Europe is rapidly seeking to rearm, but it faces a serious obstacle, a lack of qualified personnel who could design and produce the necessary amount of equipment crucial for an adequate European defence strategy.

In response to that challenge, the European Union has set an ambitious goal, by 2030 to retrain or further upskill 600,000 workers for work in the defence industry, which is struggling to recruit at the pace needed to meet the Union's growing defence demands, writes Euronews.

This extensive plan is part of a series of measures that the European Commission presented as part of its Defence Industry Transformation Plan, and they also include the establishment of a Talent Platform. The purpose of the Platform is to provide support for internships in small and medium-sized enterprises, start-ups and fast-growing companies engaged in defence and dual-use technologies, that is, those with civilian and military applications.

Skills shortage as a bottleneck

'We must ensure the skills we need for defence,' a Commission official who requested anonymity told Euronews, 'This is becoming the main bottleneck because all actors in the defence sector are rushing to produce more and more innovative products, and the skills shortage has led to fierce competition, both within the industry itself and between different sectors.'

The European Union is racing against time to rearm itself, primarily with European-made equipment, before the end of the decade. It is estimated that by then Russia could be in a position to attack another European country. One of the fundamental problems is precisely the lack of skilled labour, which is partly the result of decades of insufficient investment by European Union member states in the defence sector.

After years of stagnation and decline, the labour market in the European defence industry began to grow again in 2022, driven by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That event prompted European Union member states to commit to significantly increasing their defence spending. The European Union's defence industry generated around 581,000 jobs in 2023, and data from the European Defence Agency show that job postings in the defence sector, although they have somewhat decreased from their peak at the end of 2022, are still 41% above 2021 levels.

Despite the growth, the European Commission's latest Transformation Plan clearly warns that the workforce and skills gap in the sector 'threatens its operational capabilities, thereby also affecting the security of the European Union'.

New talent and defence academies

This shortage poses a problem on the supply side as well, where groundbreaking technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing are being developed for defence applications, and on the demand side, where armed forces and procurement bodies need expertise to quickly acquire and integrate these new systems.

To bridge the gap, the European Commission intends to launch a pilot programme called Skills Guarantee, aimed at helping 'workers from the automotive industry and related supply chains who are undergoing restructuring or are at risk of unemployment to move into jobs in growing strategic sectors, such as defence', the plan states.

Andrius Kubilius, the European Commission's Commissioner for Defence, told reporters that the measures are designed to 'further upskill around 12% of the existing workforce in the defence and aerospace industry each year, and to retrain 600,000 people for the defence industry by 2030.'

The Commission is also working on establishing the aforementioned European Union Defence Industry Talent Platform, which will support internships through a voucher system. The pilot programme plans to award 300 such vouchers to students.

'The idea is really to offer opportunities to curious and bright minds to become familiar with what it takes to embed innovation into the defence ecosystem,' the Commission official added.

The final part of the strategy is to use existing European Union online learning institutions, such as the EUSPA Space Academy and the Digital Skills Academies, to promote defence-related skills. The Commission also plans to establish a standalone European Union Defence Industry Skills Academy, but this will not happen before 2028, when the European Union enters a new budget period.