Earlier this year, one of our member centres filed a collective redundancy notice for 400 people. In the same period it hired 600.
When the notice was filed, ASPIRE asked the membership who was interested in the people being released. More than 10 companies came forward. A few weeks later we ran a session for those still looking. 18 people joined. The reasonable assumption is that the rest had already found work, or expected to.
The ASPIRE Headcount Tracker 2026 points the same way. Companies already operating in Kraków expect net headcount growth of 4.5% across 2026, before counting the firms that have opened here since.
The sector is changing considerably. Some roles are going and others are coming, often in the same companies and in the same quarter. A redundancy notice is a legal obligation, not a forecast, and it describes only one side of the equation.
Przemek Roth, Chair of our Strategic Board, made this case on the City of Kraków’s podcast “Kraków. Posłuchaj miasta”, with Jacek Liguziński of the City’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department. They covered what investors are actually comparing, why graduates now face a two-rung jump, and the real cost of running AI.
The episode runs to an hour, in Polish with an English audio track.
Sources
- ASPIRE on LinkedIn, 4 September 2026
- ASPIRE Headcount Tracker 2026 (members’ report)
