Megatrends One Year Later – #21: Career Obsolescence and Creation – What I Predicted, and What’s Actually Happening

“As technology redefines work, our most valuable skill becomes our uniquely human ability to learn, adapt, and create.” – Futurist Jim Carroll

One year ago, in July 2025, I published Megatrend #21: Career Obsolescence and Creation as part of my 30 Megatrends series. Time to grade myself.

Here’s how I framed it in the original post:

We are witnessing the simultaneous transformation of traditional roles and the emergence of entirely new professions within those roles. Organizations that can navigate this transition, focusing on re-skilling existing talent while attracting new capabilities, will have extraordinary advantages.

We all know that jobs and careers are changing, but do we know how much? And how fast? Hint: it’s bigger than you think, and will happen faster than you are prepared for.

The big number still holds: the World Economic Forum’s net global projection is 92 million roles displaced against 170 million created by 2030, roughly +78 million net — the same math I leaned on a year ago. But “net” was always hiding three separate stories, and a year of data lets me name them. The sunset list landed exactly where I called it: data entry clerks down 26–34%, bank tellers down 31–35%, cashiers on track for a 13.7-million net loss, administrative assistants down 6.1 million. Rule-based, repetitive work — gone first, gone fastest.

The sunrise list held too — AI/ML specialists, big data roles, and information-security specialists remain the fastest-growing categories worldwide, and AI-governance hiring (compliance officers, risk managers) is up 150% year over year with 14,000-plus open roles, largely forced into existence by the EU AI Act. The green-economy leg is real: wind turbine technicians are tracking 60% employment growth this decade, and Jensen Huang told electricians and plumbers this spring “this is your time” — data centers, EV charging, and renewables are pulling skilled trades into a genuine boom.

Underneath all of it, the pain I flagged is still there: Goldman Sachs estimates AI eliminated roughly 16,000 US jobs net per month in 2026, and Stanford HAI found employment for developers aged 22–25 down nearly 20% since 2024.

Verdict: Right on the big picture and the category map — understated how hard entry-level tech got hit. The sunset and sunrise lists landed almost exactly where I drew them; new grads just paid for the transition first.