Several sectors in the EU have struggled to fill vacancies in the post-COVID period, while others have seen their vacancy rate shrink, suggesting fewer recruitment difficulties.
Europe's job market is standing fairly strong as of early 2026, with record-high employment rates in the face of economic slowdowns and global volatility.
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Yet despite the overall market's resilience, certain sectors are crying out for workers and are struggling to fill the gaps left in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
New figures released by Eurostat show that between 2019 — before the pandemic — and 2023, manufacturing labourers recorded the largest increase in their job vacancy rate, up by 4.2%.
The rise suggests that the sector had more difficulties recruiting staff during that time. The lockdowns enacted during the pandemic led to huge supply chain disruptions and an exodus of workers from the manufacturing industry.
Once things began returning to normal, the industry experienced a rapid rebound to accelerate production and meet rising demand — and needed workers to achieve these goals.
The next biggest vacancy rates were seen in sales, marketing and development manager roles (3%), sales workers (2.8%), transport and storage labourers (2.5%) and other clerical support workers (2.4%), according to Eurostat.
It's not the same story for every type of profession, though — several sectors' vacancy rates shrank during the same period.
The biggest drops were seen among life science technicians (-2.6%), database and network professionals (-1.7%), and software developers and analysts (-1.5%).
Some experts have put the falling rates in these sectors down in part to the rise in automation and AI. While demand remains high for specialised roles in data science or gene therapy, for example, the same is not necessarily true for manual or purely research-focused jobs.
Nevertheless, while the falling rates likely mean that these fields had fewer difficulties recruiting staff, it doesn't mean that these occupations are shrinking, according to Eurostat.
For example, even though database and network professionals saw a decrease in their job vacancy rate (dropping to 5.1%), it remained well above the average across all occupations, which sat at 2.4%.
In fact, the share of database and network employees actually went up by 0.2% between 2019 and 2023.
A similar thing happened for software developers and analysts, a sector which registered a decrease to 6.9% in 2023, but whose share of employees rose by 0.5% during that time, according to Eurostat.
On the flipside, other sectors whose job vacancy rate increased experienced a decrease in their share of employees. This was the case for transport and storage labourers (-0.2%) and sales workers (-0.1%) between 2019 and 2023.