Ukraine’s State Employment Service received 427,000 job requests from employers in the first 11 months of 2025, while only 338,000 people were registered as unemployed. Yet, just 63% of those positions were filled, the government reported on 26 December.
The year-end figures confirm the paradox is deepening. In August, Ukraine reported 265,000 job openings in seven months, with half remaining unfilled. Four months later, vacancies have surged 61%—but the fill rate hasn’t budged.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s unemployment rate was around 10%.
Now it sits at 15.5%, according to the Centre for Economic Strategy—yet industry is preparing to cut production specifically because it cannot find workers. Western allies, counting on Ukrainian industrial capacity for defense production, are watching that capacity shrink under sustained attack.
Where did the workers go?
Everywhere. Around 6-7 million Ukrainians have left the country since February 2022, an RFE/RL investigation published on 1 December found. Conscription continues draining the civilian workforce.
And roughly 3.7 million internally displaced people face enormous barriers to stable employment—an April 2025 IOM report found only 22% of IDPs have consistent access to income.
In Makiv, a small town in Khmelnytskyi Oblast, draft-age men are a rare sight. Kateryna, a resident, told RFE/RL she learned to use a chainsaw and other tools she had never touched before. “There’s no man to dig a grave for the dead,” she said.
“The shortage of people with technical skills and education is catastrophic,” Ukrainian economist Oleh Penzin told RFE/RL.
The mismatch is geographic and structural. In Kyiv, there are 24 vacancies for every job seeker. In Mykolaiv Oblast, near the front lines, applicants outnumber openings. Ukraine has a surplus of economists and lawyers—and a desperate shortage of drivers, welders, and boiler operators, Penzin told AgriReview.
Take the latter: employers posted 11,300 requests for boiler operators this year. Only 8,400 job seekers were available in that field. Even if every single one matched, nearly 3,000 positions would remain empty.
Retraining can’t close the gap
The government is trying. Ukraine’s Employment Service retrained nearly 90,000 workers in 2025. It issued 25,000 certificates that enable unemployed workers to pursue additional training, including university-level education for professions such as teaching that require formal qualifications.
Yet, the hardest gaps require years, not months: schools need nearly 3,000 teacher’s assistants, a position requiring a pedagogical degree. Only 1,300 qualified candidates exist.
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Some companies aren’t waiting.
A furniture manufacturer in Zakarpattia Oblast, on the Romanian border, hired workers from Bangladesh because it could not find Ukrainians. Former Economy Minister Tymofii Mylovanov told Ukrainska Pravda this Autumn that Ukraine may eventually need up to 10 million migrants to rebuild its economy.
The invisible ceiling
The paradox carries a real cost. Labor shortages are already limiting growth—GDP expanded just 1.3% in the first nine months of 2025. Every unfilled vacancy represents productive capacity that Ukraine cannot utilize: output that will not occur, taxes that won’t be collected, and reconstruction that cannot begin.
The workforce aged 15-70 has shrunk by over a quarter compared to 2021.
Almost half of that decline came from emigration; mobilization and displacement account for the rest. Construction is booming in terms of reconstruction demand; manufacturing is contracting due to Russian strikes and worker shortages.
There is, technically, good news: employers posted 54,000 more vacancies this year than last. The economy keeps trying to expand.
But it’s pushing against a demographic ceiling that won’t lift until the war ends—and even then, luring back millions who have already built lives, jobs, and children’s schools in Warsaw, Berlin, and Prague will take more than an invitation.
