In the first half of 2026, the Ukrainian IT labor market showed a moderate recovery — the total number of vacancies increased by 7% compared to the second half of last year. However, a restructuring is taking place within the industry: classic web and mobile development are losing ground, giving way to defense technologies, hardware, and artificial intelligence.
In the first half of 2026, the Ukrainian IT labor market showed a moderate recovery — the total number of vacancies increased by 7% compared to the second half of last year. However, a restructuring is taking place within the industry: classic web and mobile development are losing ground, giving way to defense technologies, hardware, and artificial intelligence.
This is evidenced by the results of an analytical study by the DOU website, which analyzed the dynamics of hiring in the Ukrainian IT sector for the first six months of this year.
According to analysts, the overall market situation looks better than last year. Although companies published 8% fewer vacancies in the second quarter of 2026 than in the first, this figure is still 14% higher than the results for the same period last year. In June, 6,929 job offers appeared on the platform. The main drivers of this moderate growth were the military sector and engineering areas. The number of vacancies in the Military, Hardware, Embedded, Finance and Marketing categories grew most actively in the first half of the year.
Certain technology segments in June showed record figures for the entire period of observations. In particular, employers published a record 212 vacancies for AI/ML specialists, confirming a stable trend towards the integration of artificial intelligence — in the second quarter this direction grew by 12% compared to the first.
Hardware (281 vacancies) and cybersecurity (118 vacancies) also reached their peak in June. Marketing remains the leader in terms of the number of job postings with 740 offers per month, while military affairs confidently took second place — 407 vacancies were opened for military specialists in June.
Instead, traditional development is experiencing a prolonged decline. The only programming language that showed a significant increase in half a year was C++ (up 46%), which is directly related to the development of hardware-oriented projects. The rest of the development categories have noticeably declined.
Front-end suffered the most: in half a year, the number of offers decreased by 515 vacancies, and in June it fell to 122 ads. Mobile development also recorded historical lows — in June, only 18 vacancies were opened for Android specialists, and 17 for iOS. A similar negative trend is observed in PHP and Node.js.
Previously, labor market data platform Draup conducted a study that found that artificial intelligence is transforming technical roles, but not reducing the demand for IT professionals. Draup notes that AI is expanding the labor market, not narrowing it. According to the company, fields such as software development, data engineering, and DevOps have more than 40,000 active vacancies in each.
