Kraków’s success in technology and business services is a story written by its young people.
The city has one of the largest concentrations of students of any major city in Europe: around 130,000 students across 23 universities. Around 70% of the people working in Kraków’s tech and GBS sector today graduated from those universities.
What students think about the job market, whether the sector feels open to them and whether the city feels worth staying in matter to every organisation that depends on this pipeline.
On 21 May, ASPIRE members launched a short, anonymous student survey, championed by HedgeServ and available in Polish and English.
At ASPIRE 2026, the People’s Pavilion session The Vanishing Ladder let young people answer for themselves. Eoghan O’Dwyer of HedgeServ presented fresh survey data alongside a student panel with Natalia Mizera, Martyna Długosz, Magdalena Morawska, Sandra Syc and Adrian Czerwiecki. The session asked what happens to the career ladder if automation takes the entry-level rungs first.
The data he presented came from this survey.