Which studies offer high or low employment prospects?
Do you aspire to be a life coach or animal caretaker? According to job market indicator of the UWV, that means joining the back of a very long queue, with little prospect of finding a job. Every year, this government organisation assesses the opportunities and challenges in the labour market, including which studies offer high job security in the long term.
Due to the general staff shortage, jobs in certain sectors are up for grabs. Professions in healthcare, logistics, education and technology have been performing well on the UWV monitor for years. However, every year there are also new professions that are doing remarkably well – or significantly less well – due to the changing labour market.
For example, thanks to a rising number of Dutch people struggling with debt and payment arrears, there is an increasing demand for experts who can offer support in the managing of finances. This means that administrators have a high chance of finding a job. There has also been a growing need for professional soldiers recently, due to the many developments in the field of international security. Those who aspire to a job in defence can therefore rely on demand from the labour market. In this way, job security in various sectors is influenced by major social shifts. And job security is important for students, especially when choosing a course of study.
Acta
Another sector that often scores well on the UWV monitor is oral care. “Most students generally have no problem finding a job after completing their studies,” confirms Jan Tams, director of the Acta Master’s programme. However, he does not believe that the high job guarantee is an important reason for students to choose dentistry. “I think there is another motivation behind it. It is a very specific programme, so you make that choice very consciously.”
“What does play a role among students,” Tams continues, “is a strong preference for certain areas in the Netherlands. Many want to stay in Amsterdam after their studies, while there is a glaring shortage of dentists in Zeeland and the north of the country in particular. This picture of an uneven distribution of preference among students has been consistent for some time.”
According to Tams, an important, twofold explanation for the shortage of dentists – and therefore also for the high job prospects – lies in the ageing population. “On the one hand, the dentists themselves are ageing, which means that we will face a huge outflow of dentists in the coming years. On the other hand, people are also growing older and keeping their own teeth for longer, which means they need oral care for longer as well. So it works both ways.”
And training more dentists is not easy: “It is a very expensive education, so money has to be available. We are now allowed to admit slightly more students to the programme, but the minister is keeping the capacity limited,” explains Tams. “The government has decided to admit more foreign dentists, but there is still a shortage.”
Translation
Then there is the other side of the story. Despite the tight labour market, language and creative professions in particular have been struggling lately, partly due to the rise of generative AI. Think of translators, copywriters, graphic designers and text writers: these are still popular fields of study and professions, but according to the UWV, demand for them is declining.
Eric Metz, coordinator of the Master’s programme in Translation, part of Linguistics, sees that this is affecting the number of students enrolling in the programme. “In recent years, we have been attracting fewer students, as have translation programmes at other universities. Since 2021, we have seen the number of students halve. For years, we had around fifteen to twenty per year, but that has now fallen to twelve or ten, and once even to six. In light of the budget cuts, this is worrying,” he explains.
This decline in student numbers is unlikely to remain without consequences. “In the long run, the various tracks within the Master’s programme will probably be merged. This will attract a broader audience, but the entry requirements will have to be lowered,” says Metz.
According to the Master’s coordinator, many young people believe that all translation work will be taken over by AI in the short term, but he himself is not afraid of this. “There will always be a need for human translators. For example, for editing texts produced by machines, or for genres such as literature and poetry, where machine translations do not seem to be the solution.”
Handmade
Nevertheless, according to Metz, the skills that translators need are shifting. The assignments that translators receive are changing, and although not every company works with AI yet, machine translation is definitely on the rise. This poses a threat to the profession and the study plan. “We have to deal with that in the Master’s programme,” says Metz. “In the core subject of the programme, we are paying increasingly explicit attention to machine translation and letting students experiment with it. We have to keep up with that.”
In addition, according to Metz, the added value of the Master’s programme in Translation goes beyond efficiency or high employability. It is an ethical question: is it desirable for AI to take over the entire profession? “Perhaps machines will eventually become so good at writing beautiful novels and poems that we won’t even need writers anymore. But is that what we want? Intellectual, human products that no longer involve human input,” he wonders.
Metz distinguishes between assembly line work and craft products. “Handmade translations, backed by a real person with life experience, may become a luxury product in the future, but there will always be people who prefer them.”
