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GeneralStaff.uaRapid innovation on the Ukrainian front requires new drone designs in tight timeframes. However, a critical shortage of workers in the defense industry may slow developments, Bloomberg reports.
Dozens of billions of dollars in investments and demand driven by the war have helped create thousands of defense companies in Ukraine, but the number of workers is not keeping up with this growth. BlueBird Tech's chief operating officer Yuriy Faraponov said his company cannot fulfill some frontline requests due to a lack of engineers.
Serhiy Vysotsky, vice president of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industry Enterprises, said that recently one company lured a production manager away, offering him a salary three times higher than before, as well as housing paid. Some companies are recruiting specialists who have retired and asking them to return to work.
According to industry representatives, the labor shortage is especially negative for innovation development, as weapons become more complex and require more specialists with specialized knowledge.
“The market shows something like internal cannibalism: we repeatedly turn to the same people and use all possible means to attract them,” said Marta Kripyak, head of the defense technologies department at recruitment agency Lobby X.
The February survey 27 of defense-technology companies conducted by recruitment agency CORE Team showed that over a year these companies increased their number of employees by more than 50%, hiring thousands of people in total. All surveyed companies planned to continue expanding their staff but noted a shortage of qualified candidates.
According to Vysotsky, even before the war began, technical and vocational education was losing popularity, and many specialists went abroad in search of better-paying jobs.
The number of specialists is growing as people retrain, said Anna Korol, CEO of CORE Team. However, defense industry is developing much faster. There is a particular acute shortage of hardware developers, RF and antenna specialists, as well as chemists needed for explosive materials production. Recruiters say they know nearly all available specialists in these areas.
Even if companies manage to find enough welders and assembly specialists, they often lack production managers and process engineers who could oversee work and expand production lines, Vysotsky noted.
When companies need to meet orders on tight timelines, job titles can lose their meaning: accountants and HR specialists may be pulled into drone assembly or packaging shipments, Hrypiak said. She added that there is also no talk of work-life balance—workers spend a lot of time on plants that are under Russian strikes.
This also leads to fewer candidates: in July, vacancies in the defense-technology sector on the job site DOU.ua received on average from 1,5 to 3,8 responses, whereas vacancies in the civil software development sector number in the dozens.
According to the CORE Team survey, nearly 9 of 10 companies increased salaries in the last year to attract workers. Industry representatives say companies actively poach specialists within Ukraine and try to bring back those who left abroad. Specialists with rare skills sometimes work for several manufacturers simultaneously.
Workers for drone assembly can be trained in a few weeks, whereas training specialists for developing new technologies takes much longer. University education is required for training engineers and other professionals, so after the start of the full-scale war Ukrainian universities are opening and restoring programs related to defense technologies. At the same time, the number of graduates does not keep up with the sector’s growth, Bloomberg reports.
According to Vysotsky, the need for such specialists will remain relevant as long as Russia poses an “existential threat” to Ukraine.
Ukrainian technologies and weapons
Previously, head of development at a defense enterprise, a reserve officer of the Air Forces Anatoliy Khrapchynsky, said that many countries around the world are beginning to actively copy technological solutions used by Ukrainian engineers in weapons production. He cited Europe as an example, which does not have missiles that can fly 3000 kilometers.
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