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Life isn’t a straight line, and if your job has nothing to do with your degree, you are probably in good company.
Around one in three young graduates (32%) who have at least a bachelor’s degree work outside their field of study, according to Eurostat.
Arts and humanities graduates seem to venture the furthest afield from their original area of study.
Almost half of them (48%) change tack, the lowest retention rate among the surveyed fields. Rates are slightly higher for graduates in journalism and the social sciences. But even there, whether by choice or necessity, 40% eventually branch out into a different sector.
Health and IT graduates stick closer to their field
At the same time, if you trained as a doctor or a nurse, you’re most likely to stay on track, with 81% of health workers ending up in roles that are highly linked to their studies.
IT graduates also stay close, with a rate of 77%. The same goes for those with studies linked to education (74%) and engineering and manufacturing (73%).
In fact, there appears to be an increase in manufacturing roles up for grabs in the EU: experimental statistics by Eurostat revealed that between 2019 and 2023, the sector had the largest increase in its job vacancy rate in the EU, with +4.2%.
Highest retention rates in Hungary, Slovenia and Latvia
Citizenship also seems to play a part in how likely you are to work in the same field in which you studied.
Take Hungary, with a noteworthy 86% retention rate. Germany stands out too, with 76%, higher than similar economies. France sits at 65%, Spain at 64%, and Italy at 62%, all hovering near the bottom of the ranking, and rounded out by Denmark at 56%.
So yes, one’s degree matters, but what happens after that is a whole different story: it’s even more relevant in today’s job market, where, faced with volatility and uncertainty, around a quarter of Europeans are considering job sector hopping and trying out multiple career paths during their working lives.
Which sectors could be the most affected by AI?
AI and technology could be one of the driving forces of such career shifts, as well as enablers of higher flexibility levels in the workforce of the future.
Consultancy firm McKinsey forecasts that 94 million workers across the continent will need to be retrained by 2030 due to advances in automation.
According to the report, accommodation and food services might suffer the largest job severance (94%), followed by arts (80%), wholesale and retail (68%), construction (58%) and transport and storage (50%).
And this is already having an impact on workers. Concern over AI-driven job losses in the short term polled at 43% in Manpower’s 2026 Talent Barometer, up by five points from 2025.