Have you ever heard of an alnager? From the late 12th century in England, these inspectors of wools in England used to give – or refuse – their seal of approval. But the job became obsolete at the end of the 1600s. Nobody misses it. Nobody even remembers it.
Jobs, trades and professions all come and go. In recent years, you might have heard of a “prompt engineer” for artificial intelligence (AI). In reality, this role is largely a marketing gimmick in hiring, but we are seeing AI and machine learning (ML) create new roles such as ML engineer, AI ethics officer and generative AI specialist.
The coming decade is going to see new industries coming into being. Some, such as offshore wind, are predictable, others perhaps not yet thought of. So how can people acquire the skill sets that will make them relevant and employable in a rapidly changing world of work?
John Hurley is a senior research manager at Eurofound, which monitors employment trends across the EU.
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“The sectors generating the most new employment are familiar: health, professional services and information and communication technology (ICT),” he says.
“Where the new jobs are appearing is a question more relating to the rate of change and rate of skills obsolescence.
“There are new emerging job types all the time. All the things to do with AI are largely new. AI was a marginal area of effectively advanced postgraduate research a few years ago, but now it is spawning new job types.”
Jobs in big tech, lost or gained, often dominate the news agenda. But Hurley points out that health is a bigger employer than ICT and is growing everywhere, accounting for 12-13 per cent of European employment, compared to roughly 5 per cent for ICT.
The reason is partly demographic, but also due to what economists call the “income elasticity of demand.”
“As societies get richer, they spend a higher share of income on health,” Hurley says. “It’s something of an iron law of history. And health is labour-intensive, with limited scope for automation, and this tends to generate fresh employment.”
Meanwhile, Hurley says the sectors that are shrinking are the ones that have always faced technological pressure: agriculture, manufacturing and routine clerical work.
A recent joint report from the ESRI and the Department of Finance found that around 7 per cent of current jobs in the State could be displaced by AI in the short to medium. This time, however, those most exposed are often in highly skilled, knowledge-based roles, a reversal of the pattern seen in earlier waves of technological change.
Ger McDonough is a partner in workforce consulting at PwC Ireland. “AI is taking the repetitive tasks off the table and freeing up our people to focus on higher-value, more interesting work,” he says.
“That means greater efficiency, faster learning and the chance to get involved in meaningful projects from an early stage. The common thread is hybrid skill sets combining technical AI and data expertise with critical thinking, sharp judgment and human and communication skills as well as insight and knowledge in financial services.”
McDonough says the common thread running through the new skill profiles emerging across PwC – including in technology, data and AI consulting, cyber and IT risk, assurance and tax – is a hybrid of technical competence combined with judgment and communication. “The human element is what makes the difference,” he says.
Over at EY Ireland, Laura Flynn, partner and head of people consulting, says most of the roles EY will be recruiting for in 2030 or 2035 already exist in some form, but will be substantially reshaped rather than replaced.
“Roles are becoming less defined by individual disciplines and more by how different capabilities are combined in practice,” Flynn says.
“Specialisation within roles is changing. In the past, careers were often built around broad functions like consulting, tax or audit. Going forward, we expect to see more targeted expertise linked to real-world priorities such as energy transition, sustainability, advanced technologies and new business models. This means people will still need strong core skills but will also need to build deeper knowledge in specific areas where demand is growing.”
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 stated that nearly 40 per cent of current skills are expected to change within five years. Flynn says this could lead to inequality, with 88 per cent of employees now using AI at work, yet only 28 per cent of organisations positioned to realise its full value.
“When technology is introduced on weak talent foundations, productivity benefits can lag significantly,” she says.
Early-career professionals face particular challenges as AI automates tasks such as drafting, research, summarising and routine analysis, which have traditionally constituted the apprenticeship layer of professional life.
“As these tasks become automated, the pathway for developing that experience is changing rather than disappearing,” says Flynn, adding that organisations need to be more deliberate about how they rebuild professional development pathways.
How should the education system respond to this?
“Educational curricula are not evolving fast enough to deal with workplace requirements,” says Hurley. “Things are changing too fast, and the offshoots of the AI revolution are too fast for the rather plodding development of curricula, which [currently takes] years. There is a systematic lag.”
All of this is being monitored, Hurley says, but it’s happening informally.
As a result of this lag, there is a growing EU emphasis on microcredentials, which are stackable qualifications built incrementally rather than through full-time study.
Often, skill acquisition is informal. In cybersecurity, for instance, much of the skill acquisition happens not through academic pathways at all, but through proprietary credentials offered by the technology companies themselves. Many of us will be familiar with learning through YouTube tutorials or, increasingly, AI.
“There are very different pathways to acquiring expertise,” Hurley says. “Not all rely on a computer science degree.”
All of this change throws up issues of equity and fairness. Good jobs are concentrated in metropolitan areas, and a third of the State’s population generates around 40 per cent of its GDP. Remote working offers a partial corrective, with knowledge-based work increasingly performable outside Dublin.
And, as Hurley points out, skilled tradespeople are the workers the renewable energy transition will require in large numbers.
“There are lots of well-paying blue-collar jobs in high demand, where the level of wage growth is higher than average,” he says. “These are jobs where the location of work is often outside the big cities.”
As for that alnager, can we learn anything from the demise of this once-popular profession? The job did not disappear overnight. Instead, changing regulations around clothes meant that it wound down over decades as the regulatory architecture around the wool industry was dismantled piece by piece.
The difference is the pace of change: the alnager did more or less the same thing for hundreds of years, but today the only constant is change, and workers are having to continually retrain, reskill and reorient.
“The disruption organisations are experiencing isn’t just technological, it’s human,” says Flynn. “Talent advantage will come from how effectively people combine technical capability with judgment and adaptability to apply AI in real work.”
