Is There Actually a Quantum Talent Shortage?

The number you'll see most often is that there is one qualified candidate for every three open quantum jobs.^[1] It's real. It's worth knowing where it comes from: that figure is from a McKinsey article published June 15, 2022, not a fresh 2025 or 2026 finding, even though it's still being cited across the field as if it were current.^[1] The same 2022 piece found that only 29 of 176 university quantum research programs worldwide offered a graduate-level degree in the subject, and projected that under 50% of quantum computing jobs would be filled by 2025 without significant intervention.^[1] Pointing that out isn't a gotcha. It's the actual job of this pillar: a three-year-old number quietly treated as breaking news is exactly the kind of thing worth flagging rather than repeating. It's also not hypothetical. McKinsey's own newest report, the 2026 Quantum Technology Monitor, still repeats this same one-in-three figure unchanged, four years on.^[5]

What's more current

QED-C (the industry's own economic development consortium) published a report in June 2025 stating there are over 7,000 quantum jobs open globally today.^[2] Its core finding isn't really about headcount. It's that traditional education isn't giving people enough hands-on, experiential practice to be job-ready, more than it's a raw numbers problem.^[2] The most current figures available are from McKinsey's 2026 Monitor, citing QED-C data: as of year-end 2025, the quantum industry employed roughly 16,500 workers globally and posted about 8,300 new job openings during the year, a snapshot of hiring flow across 2025, not the same measure as QED-C's mid-2025 "jobs open right now" figure above, but a useful complementary one.^[5] Separately, a 2024 Boston Consulting Group analysis commissioned by the Chicago Quantum Exchange projects 191,000 quantum technology jobs in the Illinois–Wisconsin–Indiana region alone by 2035, a different study, from a different source, worth citing on its own rather than folding into the QED-C figures above.^[3]

The shortage isn't evenly spread

The Chicago Quantum Exchange's own 2024 study of quantum job accessibility (built from 5,187 of the 10,484 quantum job postings tracked by QED-C and Quantum Computing Report between 2018 and 2023) found that 55% of roles posted in 2023 required no more than a bachelor's degree, up from 52% in 2021, while the share requiring a PhD fell from roughly 35% to 29% over the same period.^[4] Demand also clusters into specific specialties (quantum algorithm development, circuit design, systems architecture) rather than a generic "quantum skills" requirement across the board. Physics roles lean toward PhD requirements, engineering roles favor bachelor's qualifications, and computer science roles sit in between, an even split between the two.^[4] Not every job at a quantum company needs quantum-specific skills at all, either; roles in business development, sales, and design make up a real share of the field's postings too.

Where the accessible roles actually are

That 55% figure hides a real split by employer type, and it matters which one you're aiming at. The same CQE study breaks its accessibility numbers down by sector: in industry, the figure isn't 55%, it's 62–66% across 2021 through 2023 (64% in 2021, 66% in 2022, 62% in 2023), meaning nearly two-thirds of industry quantum postings asked for a bachelor's degree or less.^[4] Academia and government roles pull the overall average down: both sectors still predominantly require graduate degrees, though government roles saw a slight increase in bachelor's-level availability over the same period.^[4] The practical version: a company building and selling quantum products is a meaningfully easier entry point than a university research group or a national lab, not because the work is less real, but because commercialization creates roles a PhD isn't the default gate for.