Give us engineers.

Over the past five years, that has been the constant refrain from companies across South Africa. According to findings from prior annual Xpatweb Critical Skills Surveys up to 2025, corporates needed chemical and mechanical engineers; they searched for electrical and maintenance engineers and turned to international recruiting to find industrial and mining engineers. 

Now, there is a new front-runner. 

But what has pushed engineering from the number one spot?

Marisa Jacobs, Managing Director of Xpatweb, says preliminary data from the Xpatweb 2026 Critical Skills Survey, currently underway, suggests a change in the skills employers are finding hardest to source from the local market.

“Since the survey was first conducted in 2017, engineering occupations have consistently featured among the top sought-after skills. Although still in high demand, they are no longer at the front of the queue.”

This shift is emerging from responses received thus far from sectors including agriculture, healthcare, transport and logistics, professional and business services, construction, wholesale, ICT and telecommunications, and tourism. 

The Xpatweb Critical Skills Survey, regarded as South Africa’s largest and most comprehensive employer-led assessment of skills shortages, continues to attract strong participation from across the economy. 

More than a quarter of participating companies in the 2026 Survey employ more than 500 people, giving the preliminary results a strong large-employer perspective on the real-world skills challenges facing businesses.

The survey is open for participation until 16 September 2026. 

If Engineering is No Longer #1, Who Moved the Engineers’ Cheese?

Jacobs says in 2025, 38% of respondents reported that they struggled to find engineers. This was up from 23% in 2024 and a dramatic rise from 2018, when only 14% reported difficulty in attracting engineering talent. 

Currently, the biggest shortage businesses are experiencing is for ICT specialists.

“Note that these preliminary results refer to ICT skills excluding Artificial Intelligence (AI) occupations,” says Jacobs. In prior Xpatweb Critical Skills Surveys, ICT has consistently ranked among the top scarce skills in high demand, but the category previously included AI specialists. In the 2026 Survey, AI occupations have been introduced as a separate role category for the first time.

In the 2025 Xpatweb Critical Skills Survey, 22% of participants said it is hard to find ICT specialists, including data analysts, data scientists, software engineers, IT engineers and ICT systems analysts. The percentage jumped from 14% in 2024 and is clearly still climbing.

ICT Skills Are in Short Supply Worldwide

The search for ICT professionals is a global phenomenon.

According to ICT-VET Switzerland, the national organisation responsible for all federal vocational qualifications in the IT and digital professions, Switzerland could face a shortage of 400 000 ICT professionals by 2030.

In July 2026, Eurofound, a European Union (EU) agency providing information and advice on working conditions and sustainable work, industrial relations and labour markets, said Europe is set to fall 5-million jobs short of its Digital Decade target of having 20-million ICT specialists employed within the EU by 2030.

Surely AI Occupations Should Be in the Mix 

Unsurprisingly, AI occupations are part of the picture. 

International Corporate Vision Magazine reported that AI hiring is becoming a global recruitment challenge, with global demand for AI talent now exceeding supply by 3.2 to 1. This translates into more than 1.6-million vacant AI roles but only around 518 000 qualified professionals available to fill them.

“Xpatweb’s preliminary results confirms this trend,” says Jacobs.

Across the 7 different AI job descriptions included in the 2026 Survey, participants have so far indicated that some of their biggest challenges are finding AI/machine learning and data engineers, cybersecurity analysts and applied AI specialists.

The search is also on for solutions architects and cloud engineers.

Highly Skilled Workers Are on the Move

According to a Center for Global Development blog posted in December 2025, the most recent data from Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) semi-annual report on global talent mobility, shows that 2.4-million highly skilled workers have been on the move in the previous 12 months.

In an article for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), William Kerr, a D’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy & Society, wrote that exceptionally talented people migrate at higher rates than the general population. 

“Some 5.4 percent of workers with a college education live outside their home countries, compared with 1.8 percent of high school graduates. In many immigrant-receiving countries, an elevated and rising share of the skilled workforce is foreign-born, especially in fields related to science and engineering.”

For Jacobs, the preliminary findings of the Xpatweb 2026 Critical Skills Survey underline the importance of keeping pace with how quickly the skills landscape is changing.

“As technology, industries and business models change, so too does the talent that employers need. The number one shortage yesterday may not be the number one shortage today.”

As in previous years, the Xpatweb Critical Skills Survey gives employers a collective voice in identifying the skills they cannot readily source locally, and provides an evidence base to help inform policy and support the recruitment of skilled foreign talent where South Africa has a genuine shortage.

Submitted by Xpatweb