The Ukrainian DefenseTech market is in a state of «permanent engineering race,» where the main limitation is not ideas or funding, but people.
The Ukrainian DefenseTech market is in a state of «permanent engineering race,» where the main limitation is not ideas or funding, but people.
As Contra Drone co-founder Timofey Yurkov told LB.ua, the most scarce roles are radio engineers, DSP specialists (signal processing), antenna systems engineers, and drone integration specialists.
«We entered this process at a time of acute shortage of electronic warfare equipment — and from day one we ran into a shortage of qualified radio engineers,» he says.
At the same time, the shortage is not only quantitative, but also qualitative: even among candidates, it is difficult to find specialists with relevant experience.
The key reason is that the education system is not keeping up with the market. The demand for engineering specialties has grown sharply, but the number of trained specialists has not. As a result, a gap is forming between the needs of the industry and the real market of candidates, especially in hardware areas.
The second factor is a structural shortage of people. Some specialists have gone abroad, some work for global companies, and others have already been distributed among Ukrainian players.
«Today, it is easier to raise a strong engineer than to find one,» Yurkov states.
The third reason is historical. Before the full-scale war, many areas, including embedded development, remained niche and less attractive than classic IT. Some specialists deliberately moved into more «mass» and high-paying areas, which is now creating a shortage.
Another factor is demographic. The current generation of young professionals is significantly smaller in number due to the drop in birth rates in the 1990s, and this directly affects the market.
«Many projects do not scale not because of a lack of ideas, but because of a lack of sufficient teams,» Yurkov concludes.
