Official forecasts add jobs in Europe and the US to 2035: EU-27 employment grows by over 4% (Cedefop), US employment by 3.5% (BLS). The fastest growth is in care, where US home care aide jobs are projected to rise 18%. Those jobs pay about 70% of the median wage. The better pay sits one or two qualifications higher up.
The figures below come from my report on the future of work, which follows ten people from 2026 to 2035 and draws on over 100 sources. Here every figure links to the publisher that produced it. The people in the report are invented, each standing for a group of workers, and nothing in this article depends on them.
Will there be more jobs in Europe in 2035?
The official forecasts say yes. Cedefop, the EU agency that forecasts skills and jobs, projects EU-27 employment to grow by over 4% between 2023 and 2035 (Cedefop). The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 5.9 million more jobs in 2035 than in 2025, a rise of 3.5% (BLS).
Two cautions travel with those numbers. A projection is a baseline drawn from current trends, and neither of these was built for a world in which AI agents take over whole pieces of work quickly. And a growing total says nothing about who gets in. In the US the first measured effect of AI is on the hiring of young people into exposed jobs, which I looked at in AI and entry-level jobs.
Which jobs are projected to grow fastest to 2035?
The clearest occupation-by-occupation picture is the American one, because the BLS publishes a ten-year projection and a median wage for each occupation side by side. Read it as a signal of direction for Europe, not as a European forecast.
| Occupation (US) | Projected change, 2025 to 2035 | Median pay, 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Home health and personal care aides | +18% | $35,800 |
| Software developers, QA analysts and testers | +10% | $134,040 |
| Electricians | +9% | $63,190 |
| Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers | +4% | $58,640 |
| Customer service representatives | −5% | $44,770 |
| Office and administrative support (whole group) | −4.0% | not given |
Sources: the BLS pages for aides, software developers, electricians, truck drivers and customer service representatives, and the BLS 2025 to 2035 projections.
Care is where the volume is. Home health and personal care aides are projected to add 847,300 jobs, and health care support and practitioner jobs together are projected to supply almost one third of all new US jobs in the decade. At the other end, office and administrative support is the fastest-shrinking major group, down 752,100 jobs. The same projection that grows care shrinks the desk.
Why do the fastest-growing jobs pay so little?
Look at the first row again. The job projected to grow fastest pays least. The median home care aide earns $17.21 an hour, about $2,980 a month before tax, which is about 70% of the median US wage of $24.51 (BLS).
Part of the reason is who pays. Medicaid pays for 68% of US spending on home and community-based services, and PHI, which studies the direct care workforce, attributes the recent raises largely to state and federal Medicaid money (PHI). The raises are real: median aide pay rose about 41.6% from 2019 to 2025, against about 28.1% for all occupations (BLS, May 2019). From a low base, it is still a low wage.
In care, the money sits in the qualification rather than the job title. A nursing assistant earns a median $42,260 a year, a licensed practical nurse $64,400 after a programme of about a year, and a registered nurse $97,550 (BLS, BLS, BLS).
Germany shows the same ladder in euros. A skilled elder-care worker earned a median €4,438 a month in 2025, about 5% above the median employee's €4,217 (Bibliomed Pflege). An elder-care assistant earns a median €2,785 (medi-karriere); both figures come from the Federal Employment Agency's pay atlas, as reported by trade press. Care and health are among the occupations with Germany's strongest shortages (Bundesagentur für Arbeit).
What is happening to factory jobs in Germany and Romania?
Here the recent past and the forecasts point different ways. German car-industry employment fell 6.3% in the year to the third quarter of 2025, a loss of 48,700 jobs, to its lowest level since 2011 (Destatis). I have found no published source that names AI as the cause.
Romania's factories shed jobs too. Manufacturing employment fell about 8.4% between 2022 and 2025, roughly 129,000 jobs (Eurostat). Average net earnings in Romanian manufacturing were 5,161 lei a month in March 2025 (Ziarul Financiar, citing INS).
Yet Cedefop projects Romanian manufacturing employment to grow 2.3% a year from 2023 to 2030 (Cedefop). The most concrete reason on the table is defence. Rheinmetall says Romania's €5.7 billion order is expected to create thousands of jobs, with over half of production in Romania or with local companies and deliveries from 2028 to 2030 (Rheinmetall). That is a company plan, not a measured outcome, and the local share has already been questioned: in May 2026 Rheinmetall reportedly asked to reduce the planned level of production in Romania (Defence Industry Europe).
Is software development still a growing job?
On the forecast, yes. The BLS projects jobs for software developers, QA analysts and testers to grow 10% to 2035 (BLS). The way in is narrower. Employment of US developers aged 22 to 25 fell nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak (Stanford Digital Economy Lab), and entry-level roles were 4.5% of US software job postings in the first quarter of 2026 (Indeed Hiring Lab). The profession grows while its first rung shrinks. For Romania's IT market, see Romania as an IT delivery location in 2026.
How long does it take to move into a better-paid job?
Since the growth and the pay rarely sit on the same rung, the useful question is how long each step takes. Some steps are short. A US nurse aide course needs at least 75 hours under federal rules (42 CFR 483.152). A full-time heavy-truck licence course usually runs 3 to 7 weeks, according to one industry guide, and the median truck driver earns about 53% more than the median warehouse mover (BLS). Other steps are long. An electrician's apprenticeship takes four or five years, paid, with about 2,000 hours a year of training on the job (BLS).
In Europe the long route often has public money behind it. In Germany a full retraining into a new trade, an Umschulung, usually takes two years (Bundesagentur für Arbeit). In Romania the employment agency runs free qualification courses for the unemployed, 720 hours for a level-3 trade such as welding (ANOFM). Which of these routes has a measured payoff is the subject of retraining for the AI era.
The forecasts answer one question well: how many jobs there will be. They say very little about the question most people are actually asking, which is how long the climb takes from the job that is growing to the job that pays. On the table above the answer runs from seventy-five hours to five years, and choosing the rung is the part no forecast does for you.
If your team is working out which of its roles AI will change first: vladtudor.com/workshops.