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Over the past year, Ukrainian educational platforms have launched a dozen courses on deftech — ranging from drone firmware to product management at defense companies. The reason is clear from the statistics: in the first half of 2026, more defense job openings were posted on DOU than in all of last year, and the industry itself accounts for 17% of the market. Candidates are responding with increasing enthusiasm. At the same time, the two fields that employers cite as having the greatest shortages did not see a single new job posting over the quarter.
The market that edtech followed
The first deftech job openings appeared on DOU in 2023: 79 in the second quarter, 194 in the third. In 2024, there were 2,283, and in 2025—5,915. In the second quarter of 2026, defense companies posted 3,518 positions, 14.6% more than the previous quarter, and for the first half of the year, the total reached 6,523—more than in all of 2025. June was a record month with 1,285 job openings.
It’s convenient to gauge the scale by comparing it to traditional IT. The hardware sector had 646 job openings in the second quarter—roughly the same as the AI/ML or front-end categories. The number of deftech positions for the quarter exceeded the annual figures for certain IT sectors.
Companies are primarily looking for people with one to three years of experience: these candidates accounted for 1,210 job openings. There were fewer entry-level positions—227 compared to 287 in the previous quarter. The geographic reach is expanding: Kyiv had 2,922 job openings, Odesa rose from 24 at the end of 2025 to 83, and Dnipro—where there were almost no job openings just last year—now has 46.
Who Enrolled in Defense Training
Beetroot Academy has delved deepest into engineering fields, positioning itself as the only Ukrainian organization that systematically trains engineers for the defense sector. As part of Defense Tech Education, the academy offers a five-month Embedded Development course with an initial kit of 45 components included in the cost; a two-day-per-week Drones Firmware course covering ArduPilot, Betaflight, and PX4; a one-month Computer Vision course; and a separate program for non-technical professionals. Plans include a Cybersecurity for Embedded course. The academy verifies participants in the Defence & Dual Use courses through “Diyu.”
Choice31 offers a three-month Miltech Product Management course—thirteen modules and 55 hours, covering topics ranging from Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) to an analysis of CMU Resolution No. 1275 as the primary tender document. Instructors include Kateryna Bezsudna, director of TEKEVER Ukraine, and Serhiy Tyurin, CTO of dForce Technologies. Special terms apply for military personnel and veterans. The school is part of the FRACTAL Group, which owns its own defense company, Dark River Group.
Laba explores the management of defense companies with the co-founder of Buntar Aerospace, analyzing the types of players ranging from state-owned enterprises to systems integrators.
GoIT is promoting the “MilTech for Civilians” track through product management, data analytics, and recruiting.
Mate Academy, together with Dwarf Engineering, has launched MilTech Recruiter, Ukraine’s first course on recruitment in the defense sector. robot_dreams offers “C++ for Military Technology,” while Academy4Heroes provides free training to veterans in Lviv.
Standing apart is Defence Tech Academy, which launched in July with partners including the “Blyskavka-1” UAV manufacturer and the “Last Capitalist” initiative. Its model is built around job placement: a graduate who signs an offer with a partner company repays the full cost of tuition.
None of the schools publicly disclose the cost of the programs themselves. Beetroot explicitly states that the price is fixed at the time of registration.
What These Courses Are Actually Selling
The wording on the Choice31 landing page deserves special attention. The target audience is described there as product managers, business analysts, and IT project managers who are rejected by miltech companies due to a lack of hardware experience. The course promises to address a specific objection raised during job interviews. The company explicitly references its own recruiting experience: Netpeak Talent hired a CTO, CPO, Head of Manufacturing, and Head of FPV Engineering for TAF Drones.
Beetroot describes the problem from the employer’s perspective: there are few engineers with the required background, and onboarding takes months. The academy also offers a talent pipeline tailored to a specific company’s needs—in other words, it sells not a course, but an exclusive talent supply channel.
The Mate Academy course best addresses the limits of automated hiring. The initial interview is already being automated by AI agents, and at the same time, defense sector recruiting is being marketed as a separate, in-demand profession. The program involves working with candidates who have combat experience, searching for electronics engineers, electronic warfare specialists, and UAV operators—in other words, a selection process that goes beyond simply matching a percentage of a candidate’s qualifications to a job opening.
Candidates are applying, but not in fields where there’s a shortage
This is where the discrepancy begins between what’s being marketed and what the market actually lacks.
The average number of applications per deftech job posting has been rising for the third consecutive quarter: 7.3 at the end of 2025, 9.2 in the first quarter of 2026, and 10.2 in the second. In May, defense companies received 9,303 applications, compared to 3,534 in May of last year. People are flocking to the defense sector.
The distribution is uneven. Project Manager positions attract the most applications—31.6 per opening—followed by QA with 24.9 and DevOps with 23.2, with DevOps gaining 10.5 over the quarter. Activity has noticeably increased for Product Manager, C-level, Design, and Copywriter roles.
Hardware and Embedded remained stagnant over the same quarter. The Hardware metric stayed virtually unchanged, while Embedded lost 0.2 responses. At the same time, DOU lists both of these areas among those with the greatest candidate shortages, even though there are hundreds of job openings there.
It turns out that the influx of career changers is flowing into fields that are already saturated: product, management, and non-technical roles. The positions that remain unfilled are those requiring hands-on work with hardware—a skill that cannot be acquired through a three-month online course. The reduction in entry-level job openings from 287 to 227 confirms that the industry is seeking retrained professionals with experience.
The government is getting involved through universities
Alongside private schools, a longer-term training program is being developed. In February 2026, the Brave1 cluster launched the Brave Students with the “Drone with Paws” competition, featuring a prize pool of 90,000 hryvnias. Participants designed a mechanical attachment for an FPV drone capable of gripping natural and artificial surfaces, remaining in place without consuming energy, and releasing in a controlled manner to resume flight. The entries were evaluated by a jury composed of military representatives and manufacturers.
The initiative is being implemented with the support of the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the Ministry of Education and Science as part of the EU4UA Defence Tech project, which is funded by the European Union and implemented by BRDO in collaboration with Brave1. The stated goal leaves no room for interpretation: to transform the academic environment into a source of engineering teams and applied solutions for defense technologies. Separately, the cluster recruits interns through the Brave Talents program.
The Lviv IT Cluster does not have a direct defense focus, but it supports related bachelor’s degree programs in Robotics and the Internet of Things at Lviv Polytechnic National University.
This approach is designed for the long term and targets engineers specifically—that is, the part of the talent shortage that three-month courses for career changers cannot address. It also explains why there are fewer entry-level positions in deftech: companies expect to recruit young engineers through universities, while in the job market they seek people with experience.
Who Will Truly Benefit from This Course
For product managers, business analysts, and IT recruiters, the course is valuable as a way to address specific objections during interviews and gain domain-specific context: certification, government contracts, field tests, and the supply chain. It’s worth noting that competition for these specific roles in deftech is growing the fastest, and the advantage of having a certification will diminish within a year.
For engineers with expertise in C++, Python, or electronics, the logic is different. There are more job openings than applicants here, and the longest path—Embedded and Hardware—offers the most stable position, since the influx of career changers doesn’t reach that field. For developers without hardware experience, the transition realistically takes months of hands-on practice, not just a single course.
Those evaluating a school should look at three things: whether the course is taught by someone with current industry experience, whether the program includes hands-on work with real equipment, and whether the school has a proven track record of job placement. Defence Tech Academy’s model, which offers a refund upon receiving a job offer, addresses the last question in the most direct way.
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