The European Union (EU) is on course to miss its target of having 20 million information and communications technology (ICT) specialists in the workforce in 2030 by almost five million, according to research published by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound).In a study drawn from data covering a 15-year period to the third quarter of 2025, it found employment in the sector increased by 128 per cent across the EU between 2011 and 2024, with the number of specialist roles up by 81 per cent to 10.3 million. That compares with the 11 per cent growth in the number of people employed generally, but it still falls short of what is required to meet the target for people capable of filling specialist roles.The proportion of ICT specialists in the workforce increased from 3 per cent in 2019 to 5 per cent last year.The 2025 figure was 8.6 per cent in Sweden while, in Ireland, it was above 6 per cent, having grownfrom just under 4 per cent in 2019. Skills shortages were common across the EU with insufficient numbers of qualified workers produced by local education and training programmes, researchers found. As a result, employers reported that recruitment from outside the EU was playing a big part in meeting demand. Their report recommends policy interventions to address the shortfall in locally produced talent. The strongest growth in employment among specialists in the sector was among software developers, with 1.7 million in work in 2024, up 27 per cent on three years earlier, and software and application developers/analysts, up 44 per cent to 404,000.Women’s representationThe number of graphic and multimedia designers, by contrast, was up by just 2 per cent and these were, at 43.5 per cent, the least likely to be in permanent employment. The figure for electronic engineers was 85.2 per cent.Women continue to be underrepresented in the sector, accounting for just 19 per cent of ICT specialists, up from 16.2 per cent in 2014.The Irish figures are somewhat better, with women accounting for almost a quarter of the current number and 28 per cent of new graduates.The gender pay gap across the ICT sector generally in the EU is significantly higher than for the wider economy at 20 per cent compared with 13 per cent. In Ireland, those figures were about 16 per cent and 9 per cent respectively. The research captures some fall-off in recruitment, with the proportion of vacant roles in the sector falling from 4.3 per cent in 2022 to 2.2 per cent in the third quarter of last year. That was still a higher vacancy rate than existed in the wider business sector. CSO figures for the first quarter of this year indicated employment in the sector here fell by more than 20,000 people, over the previous year, to 169,200.