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by Stephanie Overby

The 11 hardest IT roles to fill in 2026 — and what’s changed

Feature

Jun 15, 202612 mins

Skill demands have shifted toward hybrid, AI-informed roles that IT leaders view as better filled by upskilling insiders than chasing talent in a volatile market.

Credit: Rob Schultz / Shutterstock

These days, hiring a specialist is relatively easy — a SOC analyst, an ML researcher, a cloud architect. Those requisitions close in weeks. What stays open for six to nine months are hybrid roles: engineers fluent in AI who can go deep in code and also understand the business. &ldquo;Three skills, one person, small pool,&rdquo; says Neal Sample, chief digital and technology officer at Best Buy. &ldquo;These hybrids are the future of IT — and are hard to find right now.&rdquo;

Two years after AI leapfrogged cybersecurity as the most difficult IT skill to hire for in CIO.com&rsquo;s State of the CIO survey, the top of the list hasn&rsquo;t budged. AI/machine learning and cybersecurity are now tied as the hardest roles to fill, according to the 2026 State of the CIO survey, with data science and analytics close behind. But while the rankings look familiar, the nature of the talent crunch has shifted. The hunt for LLM engineers and prompt specialists has given way to demand for people who can operationalize AI at scale, govern its risks, and wield it effectively without blindly trusting it.

Meanwhile, risk management has climbed into the top five for the first time, while business/IT automation is holding steady near the top. And pressure has eased on roles that dominated just a few years ago: cloud architecture has dropped, and application development has fallen off the list entirely as AI tools reshape what developers actually do.

&ldquo;The most challenging roles are anything that needs to be bundled with AI,&rdquo; says Niel Nickolaisen, IT advisor and field CTO at Valcom Technologies. Security analysts who can use AI to improve cyber posture while bad actors sharpen their attacks. Software engineers skilled at using AI platforms to design, build, and deploy. &ldquo;There are simply not yet enough of these people available,&rdquo; Nickolaisen says.

Hardest-to-fill IT roles: 2026 vs. 2024

Skill2026 rank2024 rankChangeAI/machine learning#1 (tie)#1SteadyCybersecurity#1 (tie)#2RisingData science/analytics#3#3SteadyBusiness/IT automation#4#4 (tie)SteadyRisk management#5#8 (tie)RisingSoftware engineering#6 (tie)#6 (tie)SteadyDevOps/DevSecOps#6 (tie)#11 (tie)RisingEnterprise architecture#8 (tie)#10 (tie)RisingCloud services/integration#8 (tie)#12 (tie)RisingCloud architecture#8 (tie)#6 (tie)FallingDesign thinking/UX#8 (tie)#15 (tie)Rising

Source: Foundry/CIO.com State of the CIO Survey, 2024 and 2026

AI hiring grows up

IT leaders seeking LLM expertise can take heart in the fact that the frenzy around LLM engineers has eased. &ldquo;Prompt engineering as a standalone job title was a short-lived fad,&rdquo; Best Buy&rsquo;s Sample says. &ldquo;Today, it&rsquo;s a baseline skill.&rdquo;

But what most organizations are looking for now is different: AI product engineers who can stand up agents, build testing frameworks, manage the cost-latency-quality triangle, and deploy AI at scale. They&rsquo;re also trying to fill governance and red-team roles that didn&rsquo;t exist on anyone&rsquo;s org chart three years ago.

&ldquo;The center of gravity moved from people who build models to people who wield them,&rdquo; Sample says. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a very different resume.&rdquo;

Gen AI and LLM tools have become intuitive enough that the skills organizations need have evolved toward more agentic AI and less prompt engineering. &ldquo;We need people who understand workflows, process simplification, and can work with an agent platform to automate work and tasks,&rdquo; says Nickolaisen of Valcom Technologies. &ldquo;I expect this will change over the next year or two as the agent platforms get more intuitive. We can then focus our reskilling on how to make agents more autonomous.&rdquo;

The challenge is that AI is evolving so rapidly — and being invested in by everyone from cloud providers to the startup ecosystem — that experience at one company may not translate to another, and what someone...