What will be the highest paying careers of the future? My dcs want to earn 100k plus😁

[Snowqueen22]

Chatting to the dcs last night about careers... One is very creative, one loves stem & maths, the youngest excels at humanities. They all said money is the most important thing initially. So based on this what are & will be the highest paying careers of the future? 100k plus

Hedge funds. Investment management.

Agree with all those saying no need to criticise these kids. I love my line of work but it's creative and long hours for low pay. I met DH in the same industry. Neither of us wants to leave but we will never have much financial security. I wish I'd thought harder about lifetime income potential when I was thinking about careers. A friend has a career in a really fascinating sector but has much better earning power. It's not all hedge funds or nothing. Most sectors have in demand areas, often with niche skills, which are better rewarded.

@heartbreaktuna What do you mean by O&G and CA?

I find Brits to have a tendency to romanticise poverty. I've never noticed this in any other country.
I wonder if it's the history of having colonised so many countries with rich resources and having used that to develop itself and then the generous welfare system makes many forget that most people in the world are responsible for taking care of themselves and their loved ones; not the government.

Interesting contribution. Why did you "snigger" at law?

@Delectable sorry, oil & gas and chartered accountant

Isn’t Law ridiculously hard to get into? For every ten Law graduates there’s about one job? Compared to something like IT which is much more realistic in terms of how many jobs there are in the sector. Maybe I’m wrong but that’s just the impression I’ve had.

Thanks for this info - they are pretty competent at maths just don't really love it so didn't want to do A levels maths.
Hopefully maths with a reason for it, as in applying it in real life, will be easier to take!

@CaronPoivre there aren't many teachers on 100k, especially not at 30!

You are not wrong. The legal profession has started looking at alternative routes to qualification (eg CILEX) more as the costs of the LPC are prohibitively expensive, make the profession self selecting and run the risk of graduates adding an extra £10k to their student debt without having a training contract to show for it.

Yes if you get a job in a City law firm you are quids in and realistically will be bringing home over £100k. However, to get to that sort of level is extremely competitive and most don't. Average High Street type or regional practices, which comprise a much higher percentage of the solicitors employed in this country, are largely on nowhere near that much, and in plenty of cases it's more like half that. And the quality of life in City firms is often pretty bad - working insane hours, huge pressure to meet billing targets. I've heard of one firm where they were offering voluntary redundancy and it was over subscribed because life there was so tough. People had to actually be interviewed for the privilege of leaving their jobs! Incredibly naive to overlook the quality of life considerations when deciding what career they want so I hope in the fullness of time they go into whatever they do with their eyes open.

Tech/developer roles far more likely to guarantee big money tbh.

I also have no idea how academic or otherwise OP's kids are and thus how likely they are to be able to get jobs, particularly well paid ones, in either industry, but I hope that's been some help anyway!

My son aged 27 has just secured a job at £70k plus private health care. He's a software engineer

Fintech. It’s well paid, and if they are smart and hard working they should be able to make a good living from it.

Teach your children the concept of 'Enough'

More money doesn't mean a happier life. They need to earn enough to live comfortably on, but they also need to enjoy the job they do. They will spend 5 days out of 7 at work, if they choose their jobs based solely on how much it will earn them, and £100k is more than most people actually need, they will live stressful joyless lives.

Once they are earning enough, at a job they are happy doing, they will be richer than the people earning £100k+ who work 100hrs a week, never see their family and friends and are constantly chasing more money.

@MarvellousMonsters how do you know people will live definitely joyless stressful lives if they're earning £100k or above? It's a bit of a generalisation.

It's perfectly possible to earn a lot of money, enjoy your job and be happy and I know plenty of people who are.

A lot of those roles mentioned requires very long hours and jobs which are boring, demanding and stressful all at once. They might suit some people but not everyone. And in the future a lot more of it will be done by bots.

Sometimes the best careers and often extremely lucrative ones are jobs that you make up yourself. You have a talent, skill or knowledge that people will pay for and you make a career out of it. They should do things that they will enjoy, primarily and which play to their strengths.

I would teach them that a high salary is not everything. It can be golden handcuffs and selling your soul.

It is good for your children to have aspirations and to be materialistic (as long as they don't look down on others). £100k pa is not exceptional you would still need to plan and save heavily for a good few years to:

Save for a house deposit
Pay off your mortgage early
Choose where you live
Choose schools your children have access to (state or private) and childcare
Top up your pension - for a manageable early retirement
Access health and/or mental health outside of the challenges of the NHS system
Build a rainy-day nest egg

I just asked DD (17 & going through her materialistic stage) if £100k is enough. Her response, unprompted was 'no' for all of the above + nice holidays.

Yes, people live well on less than that but if you want the luxury of the choices above and live in or near a major city you will need a lot more money to save heavily and still have above choices. YMMV

I have to politely disagree £100k is not more than most need, if they want to have financial stability during retirement and don't have pension pot of at least £400-500k at retirement.

We should of course be grateful to have enough but the idea of ‘poor but happy’ and don’t aspire to wealth is selling a myth. It’s about keeping peasants in their place - similar to the myth of happy dancing Africans living in abject poverty with starving children and high mortality. It sanitises inequality and polarisation of wealth.

Very, very few of our friends earn less than 100k. Some people have bigger pensions than that. In fairness, we’re all over fifty so with long careers under our belts but are we unhappy? No. Most of our social circle like being well off. They love their horses, their vintage cars, their nice holidays. We like being able to buy what we want, to have houses big enough to fit everyone in comfortably and to help our children sometimes.

Money doesn’t give you happiness but it helps enormously. Poverty leads to mental health problems. People struggling with bills are more likely to have relationship breakdowns. It buys support and people to give you more time.

Did we work long hours when we were younger. Often, yes. Do most regret that? Not in my experience. We’ve thirty or forty years of retirement to enjoy rather than worrying about heating bills.

@CaronPoivre I agree. Worrying about paying the bills, not being able to afford good food, living in an area with poor schools is not conducive to a happy and healthy life.

I think within any industry there is a huge spectrum of salaries. My DH is an civil engineer and earns over that. I know if we didn’t need the stability and could do consultancy he would earn an awful lot more. IT also can have high pay packets. I always remember doing mortgages when I was a student and the highest wage earner who applied for a mortgage were private healthcare Drs.

Solicitor - many NQ’s now have starting salaries of £50-60k!

Accountant in industry, not practice though (unless it’s a big firm with large corporate clients)

Medicine - do private work on day 5

I.T contractor - to global firms

Tech/AI, or jobs that absolutely can’t be done by AI (but don’t underestimate this have you seen deep fakes and AI generate art etc?). Medicine in particular will be extremely under threat from technology. Robots can do a much better job than drs in early tests and reading some of the examples of brushing off on here it’s not surprising. I actually wonder if we’ll have an about turn and people who are willing to do things that robots can’t will be the higher paid.

If money is all they're after, I think the Q is whether they want to earn just over 100k or 300k or over 300k..and how much of a work life balance they want.

I have friends who are locum GPs (not salaried) who are prob earning around just over 100k - 150k and they have a decent work life balance.

Also know of people who earn far more in investment banking and (to a lesser extent) in law but have zero work life balance-as in zilch - literally working all the time.

But seriously need to ask if money is the only factor (if so, be prepared to frequently have 4 hours of sleep and less than one day off a week).

Also if they're interested in money, reckon rich dad poor dad is a good read

This is an interesting point. I'm well aware that my profession is easily automatable except from some very niche/ambiguous specialist areas. Which is why I'm consciously trying to unskilled in those areas!

Upskill!