You’d expect AI to reduce the demand for testers. The opposite turns out to be true. On the freelance platform Upwork, demand for QA and testing roles rose by 9% in September 2025 compared to the previous month, and by as much as 19% in November 2025. Upwork attributes this directly to what it calls the “AI workslop”: 40% of workers encounter unusable or erratic AI output, with an average of two hours needed to resolve such an incident. Upwork COO Anthony Kappus sums it up this way: “Companies are rapidly adopting AI, but they aren’t sure if the resulting code is ready to ship.”

The pressure is also being felt in Europe. According to market research by CBI, 58% of European companies struggled to fill IT positions in 2024; in the Netherlands, that figure rose to 63.1%, and 37% of Dutch IT organizations plan to invest more in external service providers over the next two years. In August 2025, Germany had between 3,000 and 6,000 open testing positions.

However, the profile of the tester in demand is shifting: 78% of QA job openings require at least one programming language, and testers who add automation and API skills see their pay double on average within twelve months. Nevertheless, 38% of job openings still require purely manual testing, especially in regulated sectors such as banking and healthcare.

For Belgian companies, nearshoring—often from Central and Eastern Europe—remains an attractive complement to internal and external teams. M2Q’s Test Professionals service places exactly these types of candidates—from manual testers to automation engineers—tailored to your project.