The Complex Reality of Georgia’s STEM Labor Market: Why the Country Is Repeating the Mistakes Others Have Already Overcome

Georgia’s STEM ecosystem is facing a convergence of structural pressures that reflect both its historical legacy and the demands of a rapidly advancing technological era. This landscape is captured powerfully in the 2025 study “Understanding STEM Employment Challenges in Georgia: A Qualitative Analysis of Employer Perspectives”, which outlines how employers themselves see the deep fractures running through the sector — including severe talent drain, uncompetitive salaries, education–labor market mismatch, gender barriers, and stark regional inequality.

These issues are not isolated; they form a system of interdependent weaknesses that reveal why the country is struggling to build a high-tech economy. Talent drain has become the defining challenge. Specialists in programming, AI, engineering, physics and biomedical research remain physically in Georgia but work entirely for foreign companies, leaving the local market without senior expertise. This pattern strongly resembles what happened in Romania and Bulgaria in the early 2010s, when the domestic tech sector collapsed under the weight of its own talent leaving for higher-paying markets.

In healthcare, the situation is even more dramatic. Nurses and therapists are leaving the country in a process nearly identical to Poland’s post-accession migration wave, where thousands moved to Western Europe in search of better pay and stable working conditions. Georgia’s case is even more severe because the outflow affects regional health systems far more rapidly than new workers can be trained. Engineering faces a similar dilemma: graduates meet real industrial equipment for the first time only after employment, just as happened in Croatia before its reforms tied universities to engineering firms and national infrastructure projects.

The disconnect between education and the labor market is one of the most damaging structural weaknesses. Georgia’s universities still emphasize theory over practice, echoing the earlier experiences of India, the Philippines and Malaysia, where massive numbers of STEM graduates could not meet industry needs until educational programs were rebuilt around applied skills and direct industry partnerships.

Gender imbalance remains deeply rooted. Women enter STEM fields but rarely reach leadership positions, and they remain underrepresented in engineering, AI and other high-impact technical fields. This mirrors Japan and South Korea before they introduced national policies to boost women’s advancement in science and technology. Georgia has yet to implement such systemic interventions, leaving gender structures largely unchanged.

Regional inequality is perhaps the least visible yet most damaging element. Almost all meaningful STEM opportunities — laboratories, training centers, research infrastructure and high-paying jobs — are concentrated in Tbilisi. This dynamic strongly resembles the long-standing north–south divide in Italy, where technological and educational gaps created decades-long patterns of uneven development. Without regional innovation hubs, provincial universities and local R&D centers, Georgia cannot expect balanced growth.

Taken together, these trends show that STEM challenges are not merely educational deficiencies; they reflect the deeper structure of Georgia’s economic model. Unless the STEM system undergoes fundamental renewal, the country risks remaining a consumer rather than a producer of technological progress.

At the foundation of this analysis stands the perspective offered by the study “Understanding STEM Employment Challenges in Georgia: A Qualitative Analysis of Employer Perspectives”, which makes clear that Georgia’s STEM crisis is solvable — but only through structural reforms, not minor adjustments. The country now stands at a crossroads familiar to many nations: it can either repeat their mistakes or learn from their experience and build its own technological future.