What jobs will be in demand in 5 years?
Jobs projected to grow fastest include healthcare roles such as nurse practitioners and physical therapist assistants, data scientists and information security analysts, and solar and wind technicians. Healthcare and social assistance is expected to add the most jobs, while office and administrative support roles are projected to shrink.
- Healthcare: about a third of projected new jobs.
- Data and security: data scientists, security analysts.
- Energy: solar installers and wind technicians.
- Skilled trades remain hard to automate.
- Office and administrative support is projected to shrink.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2025 to 2035 projections list nurse practitioners (41 percent), solar photovoltaic installers (37 percent), data scientists (35 percent) and wind turbine technicians (30 percent) as the fastest-growing occupations. Healthcare support and practitioner roles together are expected to account for almost a third of new jobs, while office and administrative support occupations are projected to lose about 752,000 jobs, partly because of automation.
Maybe you're picking a major, switching fields or advising someone else. Most lists either repeat the obvious or chase whatever was trending that month. Long-term forces such as an aging population, energy investment and automation are more predictable than specific job titles.
Which jobs will be most in demand?
An aging population is one of the most predictable drivers of labor demand. The BLS projects healthcare support occupations to grow 13.3 percent and healthcare practitioners 8 percent from 2025 to 2035, together accounting for almost a third of all new jobs, with nurse practitioners the fastest-growing occupation of all. Nurses, physical therapy and occupational therapy assistants, physician assistants, home health aides and mental health professionals all face demand that doesn't depend on a technology trend. If you are choosing a career partly on demand, healthcare is a well-supported bet.
Are skilled trades jobs in demand?
Plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, mechanics — these jobs have seen rising demand and rising wages for the past decade, and the reasons, including an aging workforce and steady demand for the work, are not going away soon. Skilled trades are also among the most automation-resistant categories of work — physical, on-site, situational. If you have aptitude for this kind of work, the outlook is favorable.
Will there be more jobs because of AI?
AI itself is a moving target — pure AI engineering jobs are unstable in their definitions and sometimes in their existence. But roles that integrate AI into specific industries — AI-enabled product management, AI-enabled financial analysis, AI-enabled clinical workflows — are growing as the technology spreads from tech companies into other sectors. The BLS lists data scientists, computer and information research scientists and information security analysts among the fastest-growing occupations. The skill is not pure AI engineering; it is bringing AI capabilities to a specific domain effectively.
Which jobs are hardest to automate?
Therapists, teachers, social workers, special-needs caregivers, complex case managers — these jobs require human judgment, emotional attunement, and trust in ways that automation handles poorly. They have historically been undervalued by the labor market. As more analytical work gets automated, the relative value of judgment-and-care work is likely to rise. The pay in these fields is not as high as in tech, but the demand floor is solid and the work has held up against successive waves of automation.
Are green energy jobs growing?
Solar installers and wind technicians, two of the four fastest-growing occupations in the BLS projections, along with battery engineers, grid modernization specialists, building electrification trades — the energy transition is creating real and growing demand for technical roles, partly driven by rising demand for electricity. These are skilled-trade or technical-engineering jobs, depending on level. They are more cyclical than healthcare or care work but the trajectory is up over the next decade.
Sources
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