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Construction, the sector where the shortage did not go away when the rest of the market cooled.
Construction needs 75,000 new full-time workers between 2026 and 2029, of which education can supply roughly 50,000 and 25,000 must come from lateral entry. Grid operators need 28,000 technicians by 2029, 23,000 of them at contractors. Healthcare projects a shortfall of 155,000 by 2032, against 37,000 in 2021. These are the three sectors where the vacancy rate barely fell after 2022.
Between mid-2022 and mid-2025 the Dutch vacancy rate fell from 5.1% to 4.2%. That average hides the real story. In ICT the rate dropped from 8.2% to 5.1%, in trade and hospitality from 6.6% to 4.7%. In construction it went from 7.5% to 7.4%, and in healthcare from 4.4% to 4.3%. Two sectors barely cooled at all, and they are exactly the sectors where production cannot be postponed or automated.
When Dutch employers were asked in autumn 2025 to name their hardest vacancy, 27% named a technical occupation: fitters, welders, CNC operators, machinists, and engineers. Care and welfare professions followed at 13%. In construction, 71% of vacancies arising over the past 12 months were hard to fill; in manufacturing, 53%. The vacancy rate in the fourth quarter of 2025 stood at 7.0% in construction, 5.0% in professional and technical services, and 4.8% in ICT, against 3.9% for the economy as a whole. The overall market is loosening, the share of hard-to-fill vacancies fell from 53% in 2023 to 45% in 2025, but that is largely an office-job story. In Germany, the ICT vacancy rate dropped to 2.5%. The Dutch technical shortage is not a European inevitability. It is a Dutch profile.
Every quarter the European Commission asks firms what limits their production. In July 2026 three of the four constraints in industry fell: insufficient demand to 33.9%, the lowest since July 2023, material shortages to 12.6% and financial constraints to 5.2%. Only the shortage of labour rose, by 0.6 points to 17.1%. In construction, 28.5% of firms called the labour shortage a constraint in December 2025, nearly as many as the 31.0% naming insufficient demand. The economy is picking up, and the first thing that pinches then is staff.
