Estonia's IT specialists should look for work beyond the tech sector, columnist argues
Estonia's IT labor market is growing more slowly and young people are finding it harder to get hired. Writer Lauri Haav argues the answer is hiring IT specialists in other industries, since AI has made software development cheaper.
Estonia needs to find more job opportunities for information and communication technology (ICT) specialists outside the technology sector, according to an opinion piece by Lauri Haav published by Estonian public broadcaster ERR. He points to recent layoffs at Pipedrive and Telia, and to others that may still follow, as evidence of how urgent the issue is.
Comparison with the European Union
Data from OSKA, Estonia's labor market forecasting system, show that 52 percent of ICT specialists in the EU work outside the tech sector, compared with 42 percent in Estonia. To match the EU average, Estonia would need about 3,400 more ICT specialists in other industries, assuming some moved over from the tech sector. If tech-sector employment stayed unchanged, the gap would grow to 7,100.
Why this has been rare
Estonian companies are often small, and software development was expensive: a full development team could cost tens of thousands of euros per month. Artificial intelligence has changed this, as work that once needed a whole team can sometimes be done by a couple of people.
Labor market figures
In 2025, almost 34,000 ICT specialists worked in Estonia, including about 20,200 in planning and development roles. At the end of August, 910 unemployed people were registered in the field. Salary growth, which often reached 8–12 percent a year in the past, generally stood at 4–6 percent in 2025.
The situation is harder for young people: from 2022 to 2025, the number of employed ICT specialists under 25 fell by 24 percent, from 2,405 to 1,839. Meanwhile, a record 1,123 students graduated from ICT programs in the 2024–2025 academic year.
The author's proposals
Haav notes that ICT graduates make up about 9 percent of all higher education graduates in Estonia, versus an EU average of 4 percent. He therefore argues it is more important to teach technology creation and implementation skills to people in other fields than to keep increasing ICT graduate numbers. For companies, he suggests projects lasting several months that can produce a working solution, rather than one-day workshops.
