Do young people choose careers the economy can’t sustain?

Across the world, governments, employers and educators are grappling with the same question: how do we prepare young people for a labour market that is being reshaped simultaneously by artificial intelligence (AI), demographic change, geopolitical instability and the green transition?

New findings from the Latvian Education Accelerator, part of the World Economic Forum’s Accelerators Network, offer a revealing snapshot of how these global forces are already playing out at the national level and why career education has become a strategic issue.

Based on a nationally representative survey of nearly 5,000 secondary-school students (ages 15-19) conducted in late 2024 and late 2025, the data points to four converging trends that should concern policy-makers well beyond Latvia.

Across the first two years of the survey, the data points to a clear and persistent misalignment between young people’s career aspirations and the structure of the economy, with early signs that this gap may be widening.

Interest in entrepreneurship, finance, economics and information communications technology (ICT) remains lower than expected given their central role in productivity and competitiveness in the AI era and has declined compared to the previous year.

At the same time, interest continues to concentrate in creative industries, sports and beauty services – sectors that play an important social and cultural role but account for a relatively small share of gross domestic product and employment.

Strategically critical fields such as energy, transport, logistics and manufacturing attract consistently low interest among students, despite being foundational to energy security, supply-chain resilience and industrial competitiveness.

This is not a criticism of young people’s values or creativity. It is a structural signal: aspirations are increasingly shaped by visibility and narratives rather than by labour-market signals. Influencers are rarely engineers or electricians; entrepreneurs seldom receive awards on prime-time television.

Over time, this gap between aspiration and opportunity becomes an economic risk.

As career choices become more complex, access to professional guidance varies significantly across countries.

In Latvia, only 17% of students report having had an individual conversation with a career counsellor at school, compared to over 55% across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries, where such guidance often begins before the age of 15.

This contrast highlights how uneven access to career support can shape the quality of young people’s decisions at a critical stage of their lives.

Instead, young people rely primarily on parents and peers. While these networks are invaluable, they are rarely equipped with up-to-date information about skills demand, emerging occupations or technological disruption.

The result is not a lack of ambition but decision-making based on perceptions rather than data, which is a pattern that increases the likelihood of mismatches, later re-training or disengagement from the labour market.

AI is transforming tasks, entry-level roles and skill requirements across almost all sectors. Yet the survey shows that only 8% of students have more than occasional discussions at school about how AI is likely to change work and professions.

Most students intuitively understand that AI will matter. What they lack is clarity about which skills will become more valuable, which roles will evolve and how to position themselves in a technology-rich economy.

Without structured dialogue, AI becomes a source of anxiety rather than agency. This matters particularly for young people, whose first steps into the labour market are often the most exposed to automation and task redesign.

Young people are eager to engage with the world of work early. Yet nearly half of students who sought a summer internship or job were unable to secure one, primarily because employers offered few placements.

This is a missed opportunity. Early work experience is one of the most effective ways to translate abstract career ideas into concrete understanding, especially for sectors that suffer from low visibility but high strategic importance.

These findings arrive as global discussions increasingly frame skills as a cornerstone of economic resilience and security.

The Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 consistently shows that technological change will both displace and create roles but that skills adaptability is the decisive variable. At the same time, geopolitical fragmentation, defence needs and energy transitions are placing renewed emphasis on industrial capacity, logistics and technical expertise.

If young people systematically opt out of these fields due to limited exposure and guidance rather than informed choice, countries risk long-term capacity gaps that cannot be quickly closed.

The Latvian experience also points to practical, scalable responses:

A useful lens here comes from the Japanese concept of “ikigai,” often described as the intersection between what a person enjoys, what they are good at, what society needs and what can sustain a livelihood.

The survey suggests that many young people have a strong sense of the first dimension regarding their passion but far less support in exploring the others. Rebalancing this does not mean discouraging creativity or sport. These are vital spaces for physical, emotional and cognitive development but are less often foundations for professions.

Helping young people see how their interests can connect to broader economic and social needs doesn’t mean they must narrow their choice, it is about making their choices sustainable.