For companies 7,000 engineers untraceable

Nearly 7,000 engineers will be unemployed in the last few months of 2025. The number, compiled by the National Council of Engineers' Study Centre on the basis of data from the Excelsior system and presented at the category's congress in Ancona, confirms a trend that has been gaining strength in recent years: the need for certain specialisations is systematically difficult to fill.

At the top of the classification of professional figures most in demand in Italy today are, in fact, always graduates in engineering. According to the Excelsior Information System, in 2024, for example, there was a demand for more than 24,000 graduates in industrial and management engineering, more than 14,000 civil engineers and more than 13,000 mechanical engineers. If one adds up the three specialisations, engineers are, within the context of the most highly specialised professions, those for which the market has expressed the highest demand.

At the same time, however, engineers also appear to be the most difficult figures to find along with designers in the ICT field. In 2024, industrial and management engineers, energy and mechanical engineers and civil engineers occupied second, third and fourth place respectively in terms of the level of difficulty of recruitment encountered by companies. The latest figures for September 2025 also confirm this difficulty.

Of the more than 90,000 graduates in the various disciplines for which the market currently expresses a demand, engineers are those for whom there are the highest levels of finding difficulties. Currently, the level of difficulty in finding industrial engineers (i.e. the percentage of companies that have difficulty finding a professional figure) is 62 per cent, that for electronic and information engineers is 54 per cent and that for civil engineers is 55 per cent.

But what is the reason for this? According to the Study Centre, it is to be found in the growing demand for areas of engineering other than traditional civil engineering. In the last four or five years there has been a surge in demand for engineers working in the ICT and management branch and, although the number of enrolments in these degree classes is increasing, this trend is not able to compensate for the demand. Added to this is the fact that many companies and professional firms are finding it difficult to recruit engineers working in the civil field, which is more directly related to the construction sector. In this case, the construction boom, which has been recorded in recent years, is weighing heavily.