The Jobs of 2035: Which Degree Should You Actually Choose?

Ten years ago, "prompt engineer," "sustainability officer," and "AI ethics specialist" were not jobs. Today they are advertised roles with real salaries. This is the pattern that most career advice misses: the best opportunities in 2035 will disproportionately be in fields that are only now taking shape, where demand is racing ahead of the supply of qualified people. Get into one of those early, and you spend your twenties as a scarce specialist rather than one more applicant in a crowded queue.

The difficulty, of course, is that you cannot study for a job that does not have a degree yet. So the real skill is reading the underlying trends — the forces so large they are almost certain to create work — and choosing a field of study that positions you at their leading edge. Let us walk through the trends that are safe to bet on, and what to study for each.

Four forces that will define the next decade

Almost every fast-growing career of the 2030s traces back to one of four deep shifts. If your degree sits on top of one of these, you are swimming with the current.

1. The energy transition

The move away from fossil fuels is the largest industrial project in human history, and it is only beginning. It is not one job; it is an entire economy — designing, building, installing, financing, maintaining and governing clean-energy systems. This creates demand at every level, from PhD materials scientists working on batteries to the technicians who install and service them.

What to study: renewable-energy engineering, electrical and power engineering, environmental science, materials science, and — the underrated option — energy-focused economics and policy. Even finance and law have booming sub-fields here: someone has to fund and regulate all of this.

2. Ageing populations and the health economy

Across Europe, East Asia and North America, populations are ageing fast. Older societies need dramatically more healthcare, and they need it delivered in new ways — at home, remotely, and with technology assisting human carers. This is one of the most reliable demand signals in the entire economy, because it is driven by demographics, which are almost impossible to reverse quickly.

What to study: nursing, medicine, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, biomedical engineering, health informatics, gerontology, and public health. The combination of a health qualification with data or technology skills is especially powerful.

3. The data and AI layer under everything

Every industry is being rebuilt on a foundation of data and machine learning. This does not only create jobs for AI researchers — it creates them for the far larger group of people who apply, integrate, secure and govern these systems inside ordinary organisations. Cybersecurity alone faces a chronic global shortage of skilled people that shows no sign of closing.

What to study: computer science, data science, cybersecurity, applied mathematics, and — crucially — "X plus data" combinations: biology plus data, business plus data, design plus data. The specialists who understand both a domain and the technology under it are the ones who become indispensable.

4. The trust and human-experience premium

As routine work automates, the things machines cannot do gain value. Anything that depends on human creativity, persuasion, care, ethics or physical craft becomes relatively scarcer and better paid. This is the counter-intuitive trend: in a more automated world, deeply human skills command a premium.

What to study: this is less about a single subject and more about depth. Psychology, design, communication, the creative arts, and the caring professions all sit here — but so does any field studied to the level where genuine judgement and originality begin. A philosophy graduate who can think clearly about AI ethics is suddenly very employable.

Concrete roles that will likely be big by 2035

To make this less abstract, here are roles that either barely exist today or are set to grow sharply, mapped to what you would study:

• Renewable-energy systems engineer — power or renewable-energy engineering
• Robotics maintenance technician — mechatronics, applied engineering
• AI ethics and governance specialist — philosophy, law, computer science
• Health data analyst — health informatics, data science
• Sustainability and carbon officer — environmental science, business
• Cybersecurity specialist — cybersecurity, computer science
• Human–machine interaction designer — design, psychology, HCI
• Elder-care coordinator with tech skills — nursing, gerontology, health tech
• Bioinformatics specialist — biology plus computing
• Climate-adaptation planner — urban planning, environmental engineering

What unites this list is that none of these jobs are threatened by the automation described in our companion article on disappearing jobs — because each combines a durable human or physical element with a growing structural demand.

How to choose when you can't predict perfectly

You will not pick the single perfect degree, because nobody can predict the exact shape of 2035. That is fine. The goal is not perfection; it is to be positioned on the right side of a large trend with skills that transfer even if the specific job you imagined changes.

Three principles help:

Favour fields with structural demand over fashionable ones. A trend driven by demographics or physics (ageing, energy) is more reliable than one driven by hype.

Prefer degrees that teach transferable foundations. Strong quantitative skills, scientific method, clear writing and genuine domain depth survive changes in job titles. Narrow vocational training for one specific tool does not.

Combine, don't just specialise. The most resilient graduates of the 2030s will often be the ones who pair two things — a domain and a technology, a craft and a business sense — because the intersections are where the shortages are.

The country you choose is part of the strategy

Here is the piece that turns all of this from interesting reading into an actual plan: these trends are not evenly distributed. Some countries are pouring investment into renewable energy; others into biotech, or advanced manufacturing, or AI. Studying the right field in a country that is building that exact industry means graduating into a market that is actively hiring — often with post-study work rights designed to keep international graduates who trained in priority fields.

That intersection — your field, the right country, your own profile and budget — is precisely the kind of thing worth working out specifically rather than in the abstract. It is what our advisors help with, at no cost. But even if you plan it entirely yourself, plan it around the forces above. The jobs of 2035 are already forming. The students who will fill them are choosing their degrees right now.