Ask anyone in French transport where the shortage is and you will hear the same answer: drivers. It is true, and it is the least interesting part of the story. The documents the industry wrote about its own workforce say something sharper. The people a railway or a tram network cannot find sit at both ends of the organisation at once: in the driver's cab and the maintenance depot, and in the engineering office that designs the next line and the software that runs it. A candidate who only hears the first half of that sentence will aim at the wrong door. In its jobs map of April 2025, the rail supply industry alone records a need for 790 new engineers a year against 250 graduates.
This is the fifth and last piece of the rail and urban mobility chapter of the CareerOn Industry Atlas. The first four pieces followed the money, the slow layers of the network, the building sites of the year and the arguments the industry never settles. This one asks the question a reader actually brings: which jobs are these, how many of them are there, and how do you rehearse one before you apply?
The labour shortage in French rail and urban transport is not a shortage of operating staff alone: the branch's own studies place it at both ends of the workforce at once, drivers and maintenance trades on one side, IT and civil works engineers on the other, and the European evidence repeats the same pattern; the candidate who can work across that divide, an engineer who understands a depot or a technician who can read a project schedule, is the profile these employers describe and rarely find.
We read eight dated documents for this piece and checked every quoted passage against the file itself before writing a word. Four come from the French rail and urban transport branch: two skills diagnoses commissioned by the transport employers' union under the France 2030 programme for rail, a third for urban public transport, and the rail supply industry's own map of its jobs and courses. One comes from the French public employment service. Three come from European and international bodies: the international public transport association, its joint report with the transport workers' federation, and the European Labour Authority. A ninth document, a European Commission expert group note, was set aside: it prints no edition date and its one figure is a restatement of an earlier report we did not admit. It is held, not cited.
We started this research with three predictions and wrote them down before reading anything, so that the evidence could prove us wrong. It did, twice.
The first prediction, and why it was wrong
Our first prediction was that the shortage sat mainly in the operating trades: drivers, controllers, maintenance staff. The documents support half of it. The rail diagnosis names the lack of labour "particulièrement sur les métiers de la maintenance et de l’entretien du réseau", maintenance and the upkeep of the track. The urban transport diagnosis projects between 7 900 and 8 500 hires a year on average, and says drivers make up two thirds of them. On the operating side, the prediction holds.
Then the same rail diagnosis lists where its tensions are strongest, and the list does not stop at the depot. It names mechanics and metalwork technicians, and in the same sentence IT engineers and civil works engineers. The rail supply industry, the companies that build trains, signalling and track systems rather than run them, is blunter still. Its own map of jobs records an annual need for 790 new engineering posts against 250 graduates a year from the courses it counts.
That ratio deserves a careful reading. It is a figure the industry's synthesis credits to its own framework agreement of 2023, it does not say which engineering disciplines it covers, and the graduates it counts are those of rail-specific courses. It does not mean that two thirds of rail engineering posts go unfilled. It means the industry cannot fill them from its own pipeline, and so recruits engineers trained for something else. That is a door, not a wall, and it is the most useful single fact in this piece for a young engineer from aerospace, energy or software.
So the first prediction fails as written. The shortage is not concentrated in the operating trades. It runs from the driver's cab to the engineering office, and the employers say so themselves.
The shortage runs from the driver’s cab to the engineering office
| What the document prints | Measure | Publisher, date |
|---|---|---|
| 7 900 to 8 500 hires a year in urban transport, two thirds of them drivers | Projected annual hires | UTP for France 2030, May 2023 |
| 2 000 to 3 900 hires a year for rail passenger transport, 140 to 290 for freight | Projected annual hires | UTP for France 2030, May 2023 |
| 790 new engineering posts a year, against 250 graduates | Annual need versus supply | Observatoire Compétences Industries, April 2025 |
| Strongest tensions: mechanics technicians, IT engineers, civil works engineers | Named tension profiles | UTP for France 2030, May 2023 |
Sources 3 France 2030 · 1 Secrétariat général pour l'investissement · 4 Observatoire Compétences Industries (EDEC industrie ferroviaire) · 2 Secrétariat général pour l'investissement
Notice what the exhibit refuses to do. The three hiring projections come from separate studies, each with its own scope: urban transport, rail passengers, rail freight and the supply industry. Adding them would produce a national total that no document prints and no employer has signed. We print each range as published and leave it there.
What the regional data adds, and where it stops
A national branch study is an employer's forecast. A public employment survey is something different: it asks employers, region by region, how many people they plan to hire and how many of those hires they expect to be difficult. The Grand Est edition of that survey, published in April 2025, names among the occupations with the highest rates of recruitment difficulty "des métiers de conducteurs de transport en commun", public transport drivers on the road, alongside skilled masons and plumbers.
We use it for one thing only. It confirms, from a source that is not the industry itself, that drivers are hard to hire in at least one French region. It covers Grand Est and nothing else, and its field excludes state administrations and some public companies, so it is silent on the national railway's own staff. We never present it as a national figure.
Europe sees the same two ends
Our third prediction was that signalling engineers would appear as a named shortage in both the French and the European evidence. Signalling is the discipline every rail insider mentions first when asked what is scarce. None of the documents we admitted names it.
What the European documents name instead is the same two-ended pattern. The international public transport association's policy brief of 11 October 2024 states that "it is estimated that the sector lacks 10% of bus drivers required to deliver the service levels expected by transport authorities and passengers." In the same passage it adds "shortages of certain professions, particularly high voltage electricians and works Inspectors, as well as electrotechnical and IT engineers." The joint global report it published with the transport workers' federation in June 2025 describes the workforce as evolving, "with new opportunities emerging in information technology (IT), engineering, project management, and electric vehicle (EV) systems."
Europe names the same scarcities, and signalling is not among them
| What the document prints | Measure | Publisher, date |
|---|---|---|
| Sector lacks an estimated 10% of the bus drivers it needs; shortages of high-voltage electricians, works inspectors, electrotechnical and IT engineers | Estimated gap and named profiles | UITP, 11 October 2024 |
| New opportunities in IT, engineering, project management and electric vehicle systems | Growing fields, uncounted | UITP and ITF, June 2025 |
Sources 5 UITP · 6 UITP and ITF
Two cautions keep this honest. The 10% is the association's own estimate for bus drivers, not a measurement by any European statistical body. And the brief's engineering shortage rests on a single operator's case rather than a survey of the continent. The European Labour Authority's shortage report of May 2024, which counts national shortage declarations across the Union, does list drivers and electricians among its examples, but its occupation tables did not extract cleanly enough for us to cite a bus, tram or rail count from them. Until we read that table cell by cell, we cite its sentence and not its numbers.
So the third prediction fails as written. Signalling may well be scarce. These documents do not show it, and we will not print a shortage we cannot source. If a reader works in signalling and knows of a dated document that counts it, that is exactly the kind of evidence we want to read.
Our own catalogue, held to the same standard
The second prediction was about us. We expected that some of the nine CareerOn simulations in this chapter would correspond to no job any document names, and that the honest move was to say so. That prediction holds.
We placed each simulation against the evidence with one rule: a match exists only where an admitted document names the profile the simulation rehearses. A plausible link does not count. Five simulations meet that rule. Four do not. And the documents name three profiles we do not yet rehearse at all.
Where our nine simulations meet the named jobs, and where they do not
| Simulation or profile | Status | Named by |
|---|---|---|
| Tramway infrastructure, high-speed line construction | Matched: civil works engineers | UTP for France 2030 |
| Tramway fleet maintenance | Matched: maintenance | UTP for France 2030 |
| Fast-charging stations, electric bus operations | Matched: electric vehicle systems | UITP and ITF |
| Metro commissioning, rail certification, mobility analysis, autonomous vehicle software | Unmatched: no admitted source names them | None |
| Drivers, mechanics technicians, high-voltage electricians | Named, no simulation yet | UTP; UITP |
Sources 2 Secrétariat général pour l'investissement · 5 UITP · 6 UITP and ITF
The five matches are direct. The two infrastructure simulations, the junior project manager on a tramway and the project manager on a high-speed line, rehearse the work of the civil works engineers the rail diagnosis names among its strongest tensions. The tramway fleet maintenance simulation rehearses the maintenance trade the same diagnosis names first. The fast-charging station and electric bus network simulations sit in the electric vehicle systems the global report names as a growing field.
The four unmatched simulations are metro testing and commissioning, rail quality and certification, sustainable mobility analysis and embedded systems for autonomous vehicles. We believe each of these is real and valuable work, and employers hire for all of them. But no document we admitted names them as a profile in demand, so we do not claim they are. The autonomous vehicle case is the closest: IT engineers are named, and embedded software is a kind of IT. We did not stretch the match. A reader deserves to know which of our claims rest on evidence and which rest on our judgement.
The three gaps are the more useful finding for us. Drivers, mechanics technicians and high-voltage electricians are named by the evidence and rehearsed by none of our simulations. They are notes for the catalogue, not promises to readers.
What the documents do not say
Every document here is a forecast, an estimate or a list. None is a count of vacancies that actually went unfilled. The branch diagnoses project hires from retirements, turnover and growth plans; they are only as good as those plans. The employment survey records what employers expect, not what happened. The European brief is an association writing about its own members' difficulties, and associations have reasons to stress a shortage.
None of the documents says what these jobs pay, how long they take to fill, or where in France they are concentrated beyond the one region we cite. And none of them compares rail with the sectors it competes against for the same engineers: energy, aerospace, defence and software. Those are the questions a candidate weighing two offers would most like answered, and the evidence we admitted cannot answer them. We say so rather than fill the gap with a guess.
What this means for your career
The practical reading is simple. The two halves of this workforce are both scarce, and the scarcest people of all are those who can speak to both. Rail and transport employers keep describing the same frustration in different words: engineers who have never stood in a maintenance depot, and field staff who have never seen how a project is planned and costed. A candidate who closes that gap, even partly, stands out in an interview more than one who simply holds the right diploma.
If you are an engineer from another sector, the 790 posts against 250 graduates is your opening. The industry cannot fill its engineering needs from rail courses alone, so it hires from outside. What it needs from you is evidence that you understand how a railway or a tram network is built and kept running. Two simulations rehearse exactly that work: Junior project manager: tramway infrastructure and Project manager: high-speed line. Both put you in front of the schedule, cost and interface decisions the civil works engineers named in the diagnosis make every week.
If you come from the technical trades or a maintenance course, the strongest demand in the documents is yours, and the step up is towards the engineer's view of the fleet. Maintenance engineer: tramway fleet rehearses the planning side of the maintenance work the rail diagnosis names first: availability targets, intervention windows and the trade-offs between them.
If you are drawn to the energy transition, the growing field the global report names is electric vehicle systems. Project officer: fast-charging station rollout and Operations manager: electric bus network rehearse the two sides of it: building the charging infrastructure, and running a fleet that depends on it.
The four unmatched simulations, Testing and commissioning coordinator: metro, Quality engineer: rail certification, Sustainable mobility analyst: an employer travel plan and Embedded systems engineer: autonomous vehicle, remain worth your time if that is the work you want. We simply cannot point to a document that calls them scarce. Treat them as preparation for a specialism, not as a route into a shortage.
In every case, the interview question to prepare for is the one that crosses the divide. If you are an engineer, expect to be asked what happens to your design at three in the morning in the depot. If you are a technician, expect to be asked what your repair costs the timetable. The candidate who has thought about the other end of the organisation is the one these documents describe.
How we read these documents
We read eight dated primary documents: the synthesis and the full report of the rail skills diagnosis by the transport employers' union under France 2030 (May 2023), the synthesis of its urban public transport diagnosis (May 2023), the rail supply industry's map of jobs, skills and courses (April 2025), the Grand Est edition of the public employment service's labour needs survey (April 2025), the international public transport association's policy brief on recruitment and retention (11 October 2024), its global employment report with the transport workers' federation (June 2025) and the European Labour Authority's shortage report (2 May 2024). Each quoted passage was checked against the file. Forecasts, estimates and regional figures are labelled as such, ranges are printed as published, and nothing is added up across documents. The European Commission expert group note on the public transport workforce prints no edition date and is held, not cited. Every simulation was placed against a profile an admitted document names, or printed as unmatched.