Many forecasts in past years predicted that AI would cut demand for IT specialists. Data from Polish recruitment portals in August 2026 show the opposite: the job market and demand are rising. What changed is not the volume of hiring but the profile of who gets hired, and that distinction matters for anyone planning a technology team in Poland.

How much has demand for IT specialists in Poland actually grown?

Poland’s IT job market grew sharply in 2026. In late August 2026, the IT job aggregator CzyJestEldorado.pl listed more than 28,300 active postings — roughly 50% more than a year earlier and over three times the August 2024 level, according to Rzeczpospolita. Since January 2026, new postings on that site have risen about 30%.

A second portal points the same way. Grupa Pracuj reported a 19% increase in IT listings in the first half of 2026 across Pracuj.pl and theprotocol.it, cited by the same article at Rzeczpospolita and later in the ABSL newsletter. Two independent portals moving in the same direction is a stronger signal than either alone.

Is this a return to the pandemic-era hiring boom?

Poland’s IT market is not repeating 2021. Marta Prudel-Hankus, head of permanent recruitment at Awareson, told Rzeczpospolita that mass hiring of developers is not coming back. Growth is concentrated where technology sits directly on top of a business transformation programme, and employers are paying for fit rather than volume. The specialists worth most, in her account, are those who can apply AI, data and cloud technologies to a specific business problem.

That is a different profile from the generalist full-stack hire of four years ago, and it changes how a process has to be built. Sourcing against a named business outcome takes longer at the front end and shorter at the offer stage. Jacek Kobus, founder of CzyJestEldorado.pl, added a structural point: IT specialists in Poland are now recruited not only by software houses but also by companies running large enterprise implementations.

Which skills are gaining, and which are losing in the Polish job market?

AI has stopped being a specialisation and become a baseline requirement. Kobus described it as the fastest-growing requirement among those appearing in at least 2% of postings. In the first half of 2026, listings requiring generative AI knowledge rose 176%.

The growth is not distributed evenly across AI work. Demand for the frameworks used to build models — PyTorch and TensorFlow among them — grew by roughly 40% in the same period, well below the headline figure. ABSL attributes the difference to practical deployment of existing pre-built models rather than original model development, and reports that for every posting seeking an engineer to create AI models, approximately twelve seek the skills to implement and operate them.

Poland’s position as a European nearshoring and offshoring hub explains the enterprise-system figures. ABSL notes that Poland remains particularly strong in segments involving complex business cooperation, and that this shows up as rising demand for enterprise-class systems.

What does the 2026 data mean for hiring plans in Poland?

Poland’s IT market has more openings than a year ago, but they sit in narrower places. ABSL reports growth in AI implementation, cloud architecture, and cybersecurity. Traditional backend and classic frontend roles are weaker. Entry-level hiring stays limited, and employers keep choosing mid- and senior-level specialists.

As a recruitment agency, we see the same shift in the briefs that reach us — clients describe a role by the problem it has to solve rather than the stack it uses. That is good news for anyone hiring here. Poland has the depth of experienced specialists these roles need, and a well-defined brief is what turns that depth into a shortlist. It is how IT recruitment in Poland works best in 2026.