Shortage occupations in Wallonia 2026: technical roles

Our roles on this list

These roles from our role profiles match a profession on the list. The name on the list is shown as the source prints it.

How the Walloon list is made

Le Forem has published the list every year since 1999. The 2026 edition appeared in July 2026 and counts 144 professions, not including teaching jobs: those are set in a separate decree of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. It is based on a new survey of staffing needs (BMO) among employers in French-speaking Wallonia, carried out from October to December 2025.

For each profession Le Forem computes a global criticality index between 0 and 1, from three criteria: the share of difficult hires, the intensity of demand and the tension between planned hires and job seekers. From 0.5 a profession is on the list. A profession is also added when there were fewer than 15 job seekers for 10 vacancies at Le Forem in 2025.

Le Forem's sector experts and the sectoral training funds then check the list against what they see in the field. Le Forem's management board, which includes the social partners, approves it. The new method and a new classification of professions make the comparison with 2025 difficult: 75 professions are on both lists and 69 are new.

Métier en pénurie or fonction critique?

Up to and including 2025, Le Forem split its list in two: the 2025 edition counted 146 roles, 82 of them as métier en pénurie and 64 as fonction critique. From 2026 Le Forem drops that split and replaces it with the global criticality index. Every profession on the 2026 list is therefore called a métier en pénurie; the higher the index, the sharper the shortage.

Le Forem describes a métier en pénurie as a profession for which employers' hiring needs are not fully met. Possible causes are too few applications, a profile that does not match (diploma, experience, languages), unattractive working conditions and a poor image of the profession. For each profession the list also gives the type of tension: structural when it was on the list several times in the past five years, cyclical when it appeared fewer than three times or for the first time, and not determinable for a profession that is new in the classification.

What the list gives you as a job seeker

Le Forem offers 398 training courses, on top of those of its partners. That way you can train at Le Forem itself for 82 of the 144 professions on the list. In 2025, 11,459 job seekers took a course at Le Forem leading to a shortage occupation.

If you want to study full time while keeping your benefit, you need an exemption from Le Forem. For full time studies you normally need to have received at least 312 daily benefits in the two years before the start. That condition does not apply when the studies are on the Walloon list of studies that prepare for a shortage occupation, a separate list from the list of professions. With the exemption you keep your benefit and do not have to actively look for work, each time for one academic year or block.

What the list tells you when you hire in Wallonia

The list steers supply: training providers, sector partners, schools and the regional bodies (IBEFE) use it, and Le Forem's advisers use it to guide job seekers. For you as an employer it is mainly a signal: if your profile is on it with an index of 0.7 or higher, do not count on a pool of job seekers and aim at people who already work today.