The 2026 Chicago Quantum Recruiting Forum, which offers hundreds of student and postdoctoral job seekers opportunities to engage with quantum employers, will be held at mHUB on December 7.
The annual event, hosted by the Chicago Quantum Exchange and the University of Chicago’s Office of Career Advancement, is open to undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers from across the country. It will feature opportunities for participants looking for jobs or internships to meet one-on-one with recruiters and technical leads, as well as a career fair to help people connect and learn more about individual companies and opportunities to join the quantum workforce.
The event — previously held in the spring — will now kick off the Q2B26 x Chicago Quantum Summit, hosted by QC Ware and the Chicago Quantum Exchange December 8 – 10. The partnership between two of the world’s leading quantum conferences and its positioning alongside an expanded Quantum Recruiting Forum is the latest in a broader CQE effort to bring key parts of the quantum economy together and leverage Quantum Prairie momentum.
“With the tremendous quantum ecosystem growth across Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana, we're thrilled to expand the Quantum Recruiting Forum and align with Q2B x Chicago Quantum Summit,” said Emily Easton, the CQE’s director of education and workforce development. “This will enable us to bring more companies together with the outstanding students and early career talent looking for roles in the quantum workforce.”
This is the Quantum Recruiting Forum’s first year at mHUB, a hardtech and manufacturing innovation center in Chicago’s West Loop that includes highly specialized equipment laboratory space for quantum technology companies. mHub, along with Hyde Park Labs, serves as one of the On-Ramp facilities for the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park.
The Recruiting Forum event, which drew 600 attendees last year, is part of the crucial effort to prepare for the tens of thousands of quantum jobs that are expected in the Illinois-Wisconsin-Indiana region over the next decade.
Earlier this year, the CQE released Advancing Together: A Unified Strategy for Scaling Midwest Quantum Talent, a new report that calls for collaborative efforts to expand awareness of, access to, and mobility among quantum learning opportunities. The CQE also launched Q-Ready, a free professional development program designed to help students and postdocs explore careers in quantum information science and technology and build connections with employers in the field. The CQE also launched the Talent Portal, a free career tool today that offers job and internship seekers access to hundreds of open roles within the CQE community’s more than 60 quantum employers and be recruited directly through the Talent Network.
“Scaling a well-prepared workforce is one of the most critical hurdles to quantum sector growth,” said David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor of Quantum Engineering and Physics at the University of Chicago, the director of the CQE, and a senior scientist at Argonne National laboratory. “The CQE, which is building the world’s premier discovery-to-deployment quantum ecosystem, is committed to creating paths into the quantum sector for a wide range of candidates and helping quantum companies discover, engage, and ultimately hire top talent.”