Careers with a future: what to study, according to the data

The job you will have in fifteen years is still yours to shape. What we can read is where the people who study the labour market for a living agree that work is growing, and those signals are clear enough to be useful.

A 2025 global survey asked more than a thousand large employers, together over 14 million workers, how they expect their workforce to change by 2030. Their answer: 170 million new jobs and 92 million displaced, a net gain of 78 million, with 39% of the key skills workers use today expected to change. The fastest growing roles in percentage terms are big data specialists, fintech engineers and AI and machine learning specialists, followed by software developers and security specialists. Renewable energy and environmental engineering also grow quickly. In absolute numbers, the largest growth is in frontline work such as farming, delivery and construction, and in care and education: nursing professionals and secondary school teachers.

The European skills forecasts, made for every member state, reach a similar picture for Europe to 2035: strong growth for ICT professionals and for science and engineering, health occupations expanding as the population ages, and more jobs tied to electricity as energy changes. For Spain they add a striking figure: around 70% of all job openings to 2035 will ask for high-level qualifications, about ten points above the EU average.

One more idea helps read all of this. In the European forecast, most job openings come from replacing people who retire, on top of the new roles. That is why fields with an ageing workforce, such as engineering, health and teaching, will keep hiring steadily even where they grow slowly.

“Seen a lot” describes how much AI already appears in that kind of work today, which is a different thing from replacing it. Software development sits in the top band and is still among the fastest growing jobs in the world: the people doing it now use AI as one more tool, and spend more of their time on the parts that need judgement.

Work that happens with your hands, in a specific place or with a person in front of you, such as nursing, emergency care or installing an electrical system, shows AI much less often. It changes there too, more slowly, mostly in the paperwork around the care or the repair.

So the useful question is which parts of a job will grow in value, and the answer employers give is consistent: analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility, leadership and curiosity, together with technical skills in AI and data. Those can be practised in any of these studies.

A trend is a good starting point and a poor finishing point. Four years of studying something that bores you shows up in your marks, and a job you dislike is hard to grow in, however much demand there is. The careers that last for a person are the ones where interest and opportunity meet.

Start with what you enjoy working at: people, ideas, things, data, or creating. Then look at which of the six areas has room for that. Someone who loves caring for people can find a future in health, in education or in the human side of technology. Someone who loves building can find it in software, in energy or in a robotics workshop.

Then look at the route. Many of these doors open both through university and through FP, and higher FP cycles often lead to work sooner and can continue to a degree later. The cut-off marks and the subjects that weigh for each degree are in our other articles.

UTalento helps with exactly this step. In a few minutes it shows you how you like to work and what you are drawn to, and turns that into the careers and studies that fit you, with real data about each one. You don’t have to decide the whole path today. Just the next step.