19% of Ukrainian IT professionals have been fired from their jobs over the past year. What do we know?
30 April 2025 20:35
More than 19% of Ukrainian IT professionals have lost their jobs over the past year, and more than half of them are worried about losing their jobs.
These are the results of a survey on the state of the labor market in Ukrainian IT, conducted by DOU in early April among 3,806 IT professionals from Ukraine and abroad, as well as 651 specialists looking for their first job in IT, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports.
According to the results, 19% of IT professionals were laid off over the past year, which is slightly more than in 2023 (16%). Most often, companies said goodbye to Senior-level specialists.
Another 18% of respondents left their companies on their own initiative, which is also more than last year (14%).
The highest unemployment is among design and sales professionals: about 30% of these specializations are currently looking for work.
At the same time, DevOps/SRE, Data Science, and ML/AI specialists demonstrate the best stability, with only 8-10% of them currently looking for a new job.
There is a noticeable difference between IT professionals in Ukraine and abroad.
Thus, the share of unemployed is higher abroad: 17% vs. 14% in Ukraine. The unemployment rate among developers abroad reaches 19%, and in mobile development – even 38%.
The level of job anxiety has also increased: today, 52% of IT professionals in Ukraine and 57% abroad are afraid of losing their jobs.
For comparison, two years ago, this figure was 48% and 45%, respectively. Data scientists and top management are the least concerned, while testers, designers, support specialists, and infrastructure engineers are the most worried.
The market is also experiencing an increase in recruiter activity: while in the fall of 2023, only half of IT professionals received messages from recruiters, now the number is 80%.
Recruiters are particularly active in looking for specialists in Data Science/ML/AI and DevOps/SRE.
Despite all the difficulties, 38% of IT professionals said they were not ready to change their field of work under any circumstances. At the same time, one in five admitted that they had thought about changing their profession due to difficulties in finding a job or a desire to do something more interesting.
Overall expectations of the survey participants regarding the future of the IT market remain restrained: 34% believe that the situation will not change, and 32% predict its deterioration in 2025. Only 19% of respondents expect growth.
