Report: Poland's IT job market relies less on coding alone

Future Collars has published the first edition of its IT Talent Index report, based on more than 2,000 competency tests completed by people planning their careers in the technology industry. The conclusions are clear: programming knowledge alone is no longer enough, and competitive advantage in the job market now depends on the ability to combine technical knowledge with business acumen, creativity and the capacity for continuous learning.

What the study shows

The report was created in collaboration between Future Collars and Dr. hab. Katarzyna Sekścińska of the University of Warsaw, with Amazon as the project's strategic partner. The analysis was based on results from the IT Talents Profile test, the first tool in Poland to assess professional aptitude in the IT industry, developed earlier by Future Collars together with certified assessment specialist Agnieszka Musiał-Terlecka.

The test is based on two established models, Talent Dynamics and Insights Discovery, and maps participants' behavioral and personality traits onto four profiles: Unicorn, STEEL, Venture Builder and Integrator. Each corresponds to a different IT career path, from analytical and technical roles to project management and team collaboration.

Four competency profiles

The largest group among respondents turned out to be the Unicorn profile, covering about 31 percent of participants and combining creativity with analytical thinking. The STEEL profile, based on logical thinking and precision, accounted for 26 percent of respondents. Venture Builder, meaning people focused on project execution and entrepreneurship, made up 23 percent, and Integrator, describing people strong in collaboration and communication, 20 percent.

The report's authors stress that none of the profiles is inherently better than the others. In practice, this means IT teams today need a mix of different competency types, not just people with a purely technical profile.

IT means more than coding

The report fits into a broader trend observed in the Polish job market for several years. Earlier data already showed that nearly half of IT job listings on recruitment portals concern roles not directly related to writing code, such as data analysis, cybersecurity, product management, UX design or process automation. The authors of IT Talent Index 2026 argue that the development of generative artificial intelligence is only accelerating this shift, as AI tools increasingly take over purely programming-related tasks.

It's no longer enough to know how to do something - Joanna Pruszyńska-Witkowska, CEO of Future Collars

According to Pruszyńska-Witkowska, what matters increasingly today is understanding the business context behind a technical task and the ability to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams. In her view, career paths are no longer linear, and professional development in IT increasingly involves building a portfolio of diverse competencies rather than completing a single course or learning one profession.

What this means for the Polish market

For people working in Poland's tech industry, the report's conclusions have practical implications for career planning. The authors recommend treating skills development as an ongoing process that includes understanding the changes taking place, identifying one's own aptitudes, and building resilience to successive waves of technological transformation, rather than a one-time retraining.

For employers and HR departments, the report signals that recruitment focused solely on hard technical skills may overlook candidates who, in practice, thrive better in roles combining technology with business. This finding aligns with WEF data indicating that nearly half of today's workforce competencies will become outdated by the end of the decade, making the ability to learn more important than one's current skill set.

Future Collars announced that the IT Talent Index will be published on a recurring basis, allowing it to track how the competency structure of Poland's IT market changes as the adoption of artificial intelligence tools in the daily work of technology teams progresses.