Five years ago I blogged about a study by the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education, identifying the higher education degrees that were likely to give you the best chances of a Swedish job in the period 2010-2020. This was because I complain a lot here on the blog about how useless a degree in anything even remotely similar to archaeology is, and I wanted to say something positive for a change. The careers that looked promising in 2010 were in lower-paying positions in healthcare, education and tech.
Now the Swedish Public Employment Service has published a similar study of what degrees they believe will offer the most opportunities in the period 2020-2025. Here's the new list, with an asterisk for degrees that were on the previous one as well.
- Day care teacher, Sw. förskollärare *
- Youth centre leader, Sw. fritidspedagog *
- Teacher, children aged 7-16, Sw. grundskolelärare
- High-school teacher of trades such as carpentry and plumbing, Sw. gymnasielärare i yrkesämnen *
- Teacher for children with special needs, Sw. speciallärare *
- Doctor, Sw. läkare
- Nurse, Sw. sjuksköterska
- Dentist, Sw. tandläkare *
(They also list “IT jobs” and “tech jobs”, but don't identify specific degrees.)
The future of the Swedish job market still seems to be in healthcare, education and tech. An encouraging thing though is that while the only job on the 2010 list that was likely to make you any reasonable money was the dentist, now the doctor is also on the list. In other words: if you are bright and enjoy working with people, if you're thinking of starting a degree this year, and if you want to earn a comfortable living in Sweden after graduation, then apply for med school or dentistry school now.
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Has there been any retrospective study on how accurate these projections have been in the past? I always read them with a fair bit of skepticism (which may be misplaced for all I know).
It is a really sad story with IT in Sweden. More people are leaving the sector due to retirement than new talent coming in. The degree limit for studying iT at the University has gone down and it was really hard to get a seat on that education 20-30 years ago. Around 50 percent of the ones starting to study IT at the University drops out after 1-2 years. It is sad because there are quite a lot of jobs.
And I forgot to say that salaries are good in this sector as long as you have talent.