Scarce skills in France in 2026: shortage occupations and what to do

How is skills scarcity measured in France?

Two public sources are the reference, and they complement each other:

Source	Producer	What it measures	Latest edition
Labour market tensions (Les tensions sur le marché du travail)	DARES (the labour ministry's statistics department) and France Travail	A tension indicator per occupation, built from job offers, jobseekers and hires	February 2026, on 2024 data
Labour Needs Survey (Besoins en main-d'œuvre, BMO)	France Travail, with Crédoc	Employers' hiring intentions and the share of hires expected to be difficult	April 2026, for the year 2026

France Travail, the French public employment service, replaced Pôle emploi on 1 January 2024. Both sources work by occupation: they show where skills are lacking on the market, not which ones are lacking in your organisation.

What do the DARES tension figures show?

The latest DARES publication (Dares Résultats no. 5, 4 February 2026) covers 2024. Its main findings:

• tensions fell significantly in 2024, after a record level in 2023;
• six occupations in ten remain under strong or very strong tension, compared with seven in ten the previous year, representing just over half of total employment;
• the decline is sharpest in IT and telecommunications, process industries, and transport and logistics;
• tensions remain very high in construction, mechanics and metalworking, maintenance and health;
• the thirty occupations under the most tension suffer from an insufficient pool of candidates, often linked to specific training requirements, even though they offer relatively attractive pay.

This last point matters for training managers: in these occupations, scarcity has less to do with pay than with the number of people trained.

What does France Travail's 2026 BMO survey show?

The 2026 BMO survey, conducted among establishments between October and December 2025 (416,588 responses used), counts 2.28 million planned hires, down 6.5% year on year. The share of hires expected to be difficult fell to 43.8% (−6.3 points).

The occupations with the highest share of difficult hires in 2026:

Occupation	Planned hires 2026	Share expected to be difficult
Skilled machining equipment operators	5,400	80.6%
Roofers	9,100	79.7%
Doctors	8,800	78.8%
Car body repairers	5,900	78.6%
Boilermaking and sheet-metal workers	5,200	77.7%
Carpenters (metal and wood)	6,300	74.8%
Vehicle mechanics	19,600	72.4%
Welders	5,000	71.3%
Skilled masons	14,700	70.5%

Source: France Travail, Éclairages et synthèses no. 87, April 2026.

Care occupations are also among the most sought after, with difficulties expected in about six cases out of ten: 69,500 planned hires of home-care workers, 62,100 of nursing assistants and 36,700 of nurses and midwives.

What about digital and AI skills?

Recent French data qualifies the idea of a general shortage in digital jobs. DARES observed a clear drop in tensions in IT and telecommunications in 2024. In the 2026 BMO survey, planned hires of IT and telecom engineers and research staff fall by 4,300 (to 18,300), and those of IT development technicians by 4,700 (to 9,500).

At global level, however, the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 ranks AI and big data as the fastest-growing skills. The two findings do not contradict each other: demand for AI skills can rise without an increase in hiring of specialised IT profiles, if it concerns the use of AI in other occupations, which then calls for training existing employees. For the digital sector, the trade body Numeum (formed in 2021 from the merger of Syntec Numérique and TECH IN France) publishes its own studies.

How do you identify scarce skills in your organisation?

National data describes the market. The operational question is different: which skills are scarce in your company? Four indicators help:

• Concentration. If only one or two people master a skill, a departure or absence creates a break.
• External replacement time. According to Apec (the French executive employment association, 2024 edition), the average time to recruit a manager-level employee is about 12 weeks, and 15 weeks in manufacturing. For the occupations in the table above, recruitment difficulty adds to this delay.
• Internal training time. How long does it take to bring an existing employee to operational level? If it is shorter than the recruitment time, internal training becomes a credible option.
• The cost of a break. What does three months without the skill cost? Even a rough estimate helps justify a preventive investment.

To structure this exercise, see Skills mapping and Skills matrix.

How can these skills be developed internally?

• A clear skills framework. You cannot train for a skill you cannot describe: what the person must be able to do, in what context, at what level (see Skills framework).
• On-the-job training. For technical know-how, learning at the workstation with a tutor is often the best fit. According to Céreq, 39% of companies with ten or more employees funded at least one on-the-job training action in 2020.
• A realistic time frame. Specialising from a related job (an electrician moving into industrial maintenance, for example) takes less time than a full career change. Set the duration from the skills framework, not from an imposed schedule.
• Partnerships. Industry training centres, work-study programmes (alternance), technical schools: scarce skills are rarely covered by standard training catalogues.