28 September, 2026
Author: Arcadie Cotruta
Which jobs will disappear within 5 years — and why that's good news for your teenager
The world of work is being rewritten faster than school textbooks. We unpack the World Economic Forum data: what's disappearing, what's appearing, and how a teenager can avoid studying for a “ghost profession”.
Also available in:УкраїнськаRomână
What is actually happening
Imagine: your child is in Year 9 right now. By the time they graduate from university, a quarter of today's jobs will have changed. This isn't a YouTube futurist's forecast — it's the conclusion of the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs 2025 report, which surveyed over 1,000 employers who together hire 14 million people.
170 million
new jobs will appear by 2030
92 million
jobs will disappear or shrink
39%
of a worker's key skills will change by 2030
Source: World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025
The main message in these numbers is not fear but balance: more new jobs will appear than disappear. But they will be different. The winner is not the person who “guessed” the profession, but the one who knows how to learn quickly and try things.
The professions shrinking fastest
According to the WEF, the roles shrinking fastest are those with lots of repetitive actions:
- cashiers and ticket clerks;
- administrative assistants and secretaries;
- data entry operators;
- bank tellers and clerks;
- postal service workers;
- bookkeepers doing routine accounting;
- print shop workers.
What they have in common: these are tasks that can be described with a clear instruction. And anything that can be described with an instruction will, sooner or later, be done by an algorithm.
What's growing — and there's a surprise
The fastest-growing roles are big data specialists, fintech engineers, AI and machine learning specialists, software developers, and green-energy specialists. But the surprise is that in absolute numbers, most new jobs appear in “human” fields: care and medicine, education, construction, logistics, sales.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
What parents can do right now
- Shift the question from “what will you be?” to “what do you enjoy doing with your hands and your head?”.
- Let your child try 3–5 different fields through real projects, not just conversations.
- Pay attention to the skills the WEF names most valuable: analytical thinking, resilience and flexibility, leadership, creativity, technological literacy.
- Build a portfolio: even a school project finished properly weighs more than “I want to be a programmer”.
Not sure which field to start with? The online test will show your child's strengths, and the report will show directions worth trying.
Take the test ↗
