The Jobs That Will Still Matter When Your Kid Grows Up

Nobody can hand you a guaranteed list of jobs for 2035. Anyone who claims otherwise is guessing. What we can do is look at what the evidence actually says, think carefully about Pakistan's real opportunities, and figure out which skills tend to hold their value no matter how the economy shifts. That is what this post is about.

We hear this question from parents almost every week: 'Should my child study computer science? Is medicine still safe? What about engineering?' The honest answer is that chasing a single job title is probably the wrong frame. The parents we talk to who feel most settled are not the ones who picked the 'right' degree for their child — they are the ones who focused on building durable capabilities while keeping options open.

What the research actually says about changing work

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 makes something clear: work is already being reshaped, and faster than before. The report projects that between now and 2030, 170 million new jobs will be created worldwide while 92 million are displaced — a net gain of 78 million jobs, and a churn equal to 22 percent of all the jobs that exist today. It credits that shake-up to five forces at once, not automation alone: technological change, the green transition, economic pressures, geoeconomic fragmentation and demographic shifts. The net picture is not simple doom or simple optimism. It is change, and the direction of that change matters.

The same report ranks AI and big data as the fastest-growing skill through 2030, followed by networks and cybersecurity, technological literacy, and creative thinking. Analytical thinking is a different kind of finding in the same report: it is the single most-cited core skill employers need today, with 69 percent — seven in ten companies — calling it essential. Notice what the durable ones have in common. None is a specific tool or platform. They are ways of thinking and working. Tools change. Ways of thinking transfer.

There is a twist here worth telling your child about, because it is the opposite of what most people expected. For years the assumption was that machines would take the manual work first and leave thinking work alone. What actually happened is closer to the reverse. A great deal of expert desk work — drafting, summarising, first-pass analysis — turned out to be language-shaped, and language is precisely what these models are good at. Meanwhile the messy physical world has barely budged: a machine can scan a thousand X-rays faster than any doctor, but figuring out why the pipe in an unusual old building keeps failing still needs a person standing in front of it. Nobody predicted that ordering. It is a good reason to be humble about predicting the next one.

What this looks like in Pakistan specifically

Pakistan has a real and growing stake in the global digital economy. It is one of the world's largest suppliers of online freelance labour — Payoneer ranked it fourth worldwide for growth in freelance earnings — and its IT and IT-enabled services sector now employs a workforce of over 600,000 professionals, with the national target set at fifteen billion dollars a year. These are not distant abstract figures — families in Rawalpindi and Islamabad are already living this reality, with young people doing client work for businesses in Europe and North America from their laptops at home.

The system is moving to meet it. Pakistan's Higher Education Commission notified a revised BS Computer Science curriculum in October 2025, with AI, data science, robotics, IoT and cyber security among its named specializations. That is a university-level framework, not a school one — but it is the destination a child in school today is heading toward, and it tells you what the country expects them to arrive already knowing how to do.

What this means practically is that a young person in Pakistan who can build things, think clearly, communicate well in English, and work with AI tools is genuinely positioned for the global freelance and remote-work economy — not as a backup plan, but as a primary path.

Which types of work hold up best

US Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for 2024-34 back three of those four. Healthcare occupations are projected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations; construction and extraction — the skilled trades — faster than average; and software developers, QA analysts and testers by 15 percent, against 3.1 percent for the economy as a whole. Education is the honest exception: BLS projects educational instruction and library occupations to grow slower than average, and kindergarten and elementary teachers to decline by 2 percent. Teaching still opens hundreds of thousands of jobs a year, but that is people retiring and moving on, not the field expanding. And it is worth being precise about what this data even is: BLS publishes ten-year projections of employment change, not a measure of job stability, and it says plainly that these are not a forecast of what will happen.

• Healthcare and care work: diagnosis, treatment decisions, and patient relationships all need human judgment and empathy that AI genuinely cannot replace.
• Skilled trades and engineering: electricians, civil engineers, and builders who understand complex, variable real-world environments. Pakistan needs enormous infrastructure investment — this is local demand, not just a global trend.
• Teaching and mentoring: especially teachers who can guide children to think, not just absorb information. Good teaching is one of the most relationship-intensive jobs there is.
• Software and systems building: not just coding, but designing solutions — understanding a problem well enough to build something useful for it.
• Creative and communication work: writing, design, filmmaking, and strategy work where original judgment and cultural understanding matter. Freelancers in Pakistan are already competitive here globally.
• AI-assisted professional roles: lawyers, accountants, researchers, and analysts who use AI tools to do their work better and faster, rather than being replaced by them.

What to nurture now, at any age

UNESCO's International Bureau of Education has looked hard at what STEM education is actually for. Its paper 'Exploring STEM competences for the 21st century' frames the goal as STEM competence — the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values a young person can put to work together — rather than knowledge recalled on its own. Its position is that STEM fosters critical thinking, problem-solving and creativity, and that these grow out of real content, not instead of it. That matches what teachers see: the science and the maths matter, and they matter most when a child is using them to solve something.

So rather than steering your child toward a particular title, here are the capabilities worth building deliberately:

1. 01

   Problem-solving practice

   Give kids real problems to work through — not textbook exercises with known answers, but open questions where they have to try, fail, and try differently. Building things, whether physical or digital, is one of the best ways to do this.

2. 02

   AI literacy, not AI dependency

   This is the house rule we use at Robonamix, and we think it applies at home too: ask AI to explain, not to do it for you. A child who understands how an AI model works, and can direct it toward a goal while checking its outputs critically, is in a very different position from one who just pastes AI answers.

3. 03

   Communication and storytelling

   The ability to explain your thinking clearly — in writing, in conversation, in a presentation — is genuinely hard to automate and genuinely valued everywhere. Encourage your child to explain things to you, not just do them.

4. 04

   Building a body of work early

   In Pakistan's freelance economy, a portfolio matters more than a certificate for many kinds of work. A teenager who has built three real projects and can show them has a head start. Encourage making things that are real, not just practising for exams.

5. 05

   Curiosity about how things work

   This sounds soft but it is durable. Children who habitually ask 'why does this work this way?' and then go find out are continuously building mental models that transfer to new situations. Feed that habit wherever you find it.

A note on the twin cities and what we see

In Islamabad and Rawalpindi, we work with children aged 8 to 17, and what strikes us consistently is how quickly young people pick up both building skills and AI literacy when they are given the chance to actually make things. The kids who come back to us most energised are usually the ones who built something — a robot, an app, a simple game — and showed it to someone who genuinely cared. That experience of making a real thing and sharing it is, we think, one of the best preparations for a working life that will keep asking people to solve new problems.

At Robonamix, our programmes are designed around exactly these durable skills: hands-on building, real problem-solving, and thoughtful AI literacy. If you are curious about how we approach this, you are welcome to come and see. But honestly, a lot of what we have described in this post you can start at home today, with whatever materials and curiosity you have on hand.