
. Are companies continuing to relocate headquarters from Europe and North America to Asia?
The movement of jobs to Asia is accelerating, particularly to India, which has emerged as a new technology powerhouse with a key advantage – substantial government subsidies for semiconductor production. India has achieved something that governments elsewhere have largely discussed in campaign rhetoric: a systematic and consistent investment in research and development, fostering close collaboration between academic institutions and businesses. This represents evident in the growth of Capability Centres (CCs), which continuously deliver advanced technologies to companies like Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia, and are driving a new development strategy. One-third of all technology startups are now located there. This has largely dispelled the outdated perception of the country as a hub for inexpensive, but unreliable, specialists willing to agree to any deadline.
Indian technology universities have gained global recognition, and annually produce thousands of skilled engineers. The country’s extremely young and large population, combined with the current geopolitical alignment of its government with the United States and Israel, is unlikely to hinder the continued flow of technology business to the region.
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Who is being laid off in IT specifically?
Companies are cutting junior positions, individuals specializing in a single technology, and those performing repetitive tasks that are being taken over by AI.
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The Polish IT sector, however, appears to be stabilizing after the turbulence of the past three years, with a slight uptick in job postings. Approximately 40% of our IT clients are now sharing plans for new hires.
Is this decent news?
However, employer preferences consistently favor specialists with experience and expertise. Our initial recruitment screening process focuses on identifying candidates who continuously update their skills with AI tools. Conversely, there is a decline in opportunities for individuals unable to keep pace, effectively combining project experience with the current imperative to utilize new tools.
it’s not simply years of experience, but rather technology proficiency, project relevance, environmental maturity, and organizational prestige that weigh on hiring decisions. The winning candidate possesses all of this, along with flexibility and a determination for continuous, rapid, and independent technological development.
Is Kraków still at risk? The job market there has been bleeding for several years.
The answer is both yes and no. Yes – because youth unemployment has risen dramatically, by around 40% year-on-year, and in our recruitment perspective, this represents a growing pool of candidates for whom the SSC/BPO sector was recently open. We are seeing this decline in secure, developmental job opportunities for young people in other agglomerations as well, but Kraków, Warsaw, and Łódź have, for the first time in decades, approached the levels of decline seen in the Lubusz and Lower Silesian regions.
And no – because there is a clear increase in demand for specialists in job offers from Kraków-based employers. An opportunity for young people is, for example, Poland’s bottleneck in competence – the EU regulations regarding cybersecurity, which are generating a very high demand for this critical skill and, headhunting is literally sweeping the market, not only at the senior level. As a recruiter, I was as well pleased to observe the Ministry of Education’s plans to introduce a pathway: a cybersecurity technician. This could be an interesting option for secondary schools and universities in Kraków in the face of the fight for students in times of demographic decline and a good path for business. It may lead to the creation of a wider funnel of candidates for specialized development, which would once again position the city well with the trends.
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Kraków, as an IT job market, has undergone a particularly turbulent transformation in the industry, but we are observing that, as a vessel strongly connected to the specifics of local employers with the global trend, This proves stabilizing and thus fitting into the general trend of demand for specialists in data science, cloud solutions, and, of course, AI.
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Is this solely due to AI and automation, or are there other reasons that are not immediately apparent?
I do not believe that the poor situation in the job market, especially for young people in Kraków and other Polish cities, is solely the fault of AI and automation. Kraków, in particular, has become entangled in a situation similar to Detroit, due to a more or less politically conscious focus on mono-development, namely one dominated by investments from SSC/BPO entities. The outflow of jobs based on processes that can be automated here or in India, or replaced in cheaper labor markets with less rigid labor codes, is inevitable.
A looming threat is the silent recession, now exacerbated by rising oil prices. Businesses will discover it difficult to generate funds for a solution, such as incentivizing brownfield projects (i.e., undertakings involving the development, modernization, or revitalization of industrial areas) with appropriate tax incentives.
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I have observed how, for example, my native Wrocław and neighboring Poznań built a strategic tripod: production for the automotive and appliance sectors (currently undergoing silent mass layoffs), SSC/BPO, and large international e-commerce, which is fortunately absorbing some of the refugees and victims of the collapse of the other two legs.
Kraków, however, strategically attracted monolithic trap investments – “back-office” investments. These jobs – as they are mostly repetitive – will flow to cheaper destinations, and with the horrendously high cost of living in the city, talent will also flow away, as no one can afford to recruit on reserve and maintain the so-called bench.
What about other Polish cities? Are they feeling it too?
Definitely. We grab comfort in the fact that the market is still looking for specialists, we talk about the boom in niche competencies, but shifting to these realities is a long process of collective reskilling of thousands of people. From my team’s perspective, we have never received so many “open to work” labels from candidates on LinkedIn. We see months-long job searches by people with a “solid” professional background – managers, financiers, marketers, programmers, and testers. In the background of this process, there is also a silent drama of those excluded from the technological revolution, 50+, compulsively signing up for not always credible training courses in AI tools.
Which other professional groups may be worried about their jobs?
We are observing a significantly smaller number of job offers for frontend programmers, testers, and graphic designers. Marketing and back-office departments, recruitment, HR and payroll, finance, controlling, and basic accounting have been decimated. Upper salary brackets have decreased significantly. The market is giving a lesson in humility to senior management, who particularly cultivate so-called job hugging (clinging to a job).
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What else can we expect in the job market in 2026?
Further transformation of the market towards senior specialist competencies, even greater employer expectations regarding candidates’ immersion in AI technologies and generation of automation solutions even at basic positions, a further decline in the supply of developmental offers for juniors, pressure on sales, i.e., headhunting the best with their client portfolio. It is also worth expecting a lowering of salary ranges and “rationalization” of salary grids for higher-level positions, savings in spending on employee development, motivation, and integration, caution in making decisions about changing jobs, i.e., lower rates of voluntary turnover.
I would also expect an outflow of men from the labor market and difficulties in replacing them with migrant workers due to the continued systemic difficulties in legalizing work and residence in our country. And also the modest, but still trending return of Polish migrant workers – in the last two years we have had a net balance in plus with Germany, i.e., more people are returning than leaving.
Kinga Marczak, General Manager at the recruitment firm HRS-IT Photo: private archive / Kinga Marczak
