Vacancies

The shortage has a job title

August 2026

5 min read

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.

Everyone else fell faster

September 2026

10 min read

In the fourth quarter of 2025 the Netherlands had 377,000 job vacancies against 407,000 unemployed people: 93 vacancies per 100 unemployed, the highest ratio of the 24 member states that publish both series. Malta follows on 80 and Germany on 66; Romania closes the list on 6, or eighteen unemployed people per vacancy. At the European peak in mid-2022 the Netherlands ranked third, behind Czechia (186) and Germany (140). Since then the Dutch ratio has fallen by 31%, against 53% in Germany, 60% in Austria and 72% in Czechia. Elsewhere that fall tracks economic growth (correlation 0.70 across 24 countries), yet the Dutch economy grew only 2.1% over the same period. What sets the Netherlands apart is the level it settles at: a job vacancy rate of 4.0% against its own pre-pandemic record of 3.3%, on the highest part-time share in the EU at 42.3%.