The labor market has not finished emerging from the storm caused by the widespread implementation of teleworking and the subsequent moves by companies to make their employees go back to the officeswhen you must face a new challenge.
a study conducted in the US by the National Society of High School Scholars (NSHSS) in 2024 revealed the first signs of Generation Z being fed up with labor drift of the technology sector. Two years later, this fatigue has become a trend, and the most recent data confirm that, faced with a future of employment marked by AI and a new wave of massive layoffs, young people prefer to study careers related to the health or care field, leaving aside to computer science majors or certain engineering fields.
A sector at risk. The main CEOs at the head of large companies, like Nvidia or AWS, have assured on different occasions that AI will make it unnecessary for engineers know how to program. Technology profiles are expected to be the most sensitive to the impact of automation as companies begin to implement AI, yielding a bad expectation of future for the sector.
Furthermore, the labor instability marked by successive layoffs in big technologymakes it less attractive for a generation Z that seeks economic stability for its future.
The fear of being fired before starting. The constant layoffs in the sector do not encourage young people to even consider starting studies to work in technology. No wonder. The figures prove them right.
According to a report According to the consulting firm RationalFX, the global technology industry will shed 244,851 jobs during 2025, with the US, India and Japan leading the ranking of the most affected countries. Spain also joined the list of countries most affected at the end of 2025, after the ERE presented by Telefónica which would affect more than 5,000 employees.
Analyst Alan Cohen of RationalFX explained that “Layoffs in the technology sector in 2025 displaced hundreds of thousands of workers around the world, as companies accelerated structural readjustments rather than short-term cost corrections.” The dominant force behind those cuts was, according to the same report, “the rapid adoption of automation and artificial intelligence.”
Generation Z prioritizes job stability. According to data collected According to Networks Trends, on a sample of more than 10,000 US students, 76% of young people from Generation Z who are graduating from universities prioritize a stable careerabove the location of the company (75%), its reputation (72%) and even the possibility of obtaining a high salary (71%).
50% of those surveyed claim to be very concerned because, after years of studying a career they like, joining a toxic work environment take them to suffer burnout or have problems developing their career. With that fear in mind, many students have reduced their interest in big technology companies, which no longer offer the idyllic work environments from years ago.
Big technology companies are no longer a preference. According to report data ‘Workforce Ahead: What the Class of 2026 tells us about the future of the labor market’ prepared by Handshakeprogramming and the technology industry have ceased to be a priority for those seeking to establish a professional future, and almost a third of young people surveyed confess to being angry with AI systems, mainly because they sense that they are going to destroy their real options for finding a job.
According to the study From NSHSS, recently graduated students are prioritizing working in companies in the health or care sector, instead of in large technology companies that have been leading the lists of best places to work for years.
Google, you used to be cool. According to the data from that study, Google went from being the fourth company in which students would like to work in 2022 to occupy seventh place on the list in 2024. Just behind we find Amazon and Apple, which also fell several positions. In 2026, the trend does not improve and according to the list of best technologies to work of Great Place To Worknone of the Big Tech companies are present in the top positions.
On the other hand, when you look at the employers that rose the most in the NSHSS study, you can clearly see the rise of healthcare entities such as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which took first place in 2024, followed by Mayo Clinic, which jumped from seventh to second place, and Health Care Service Corp., which went from 14th to 3rd. The three fields of professional interest most mentioned by Generation Z in that same study were medicine/health (24%), general healthcare (22%) and engineering (18%), confirming that the inclination towards health is not anecdotal.
The trend also reaches Spain. Although at a slower pace, the change in trend in the choice of careers is already perceptible in Spain. The branches of the health and social services field have registered a notable increase between 2018 and 2025, as reflected in the study ‘Employability of young people in Spain’ 2025 prepared by the CYD Foundation.
Medicine is the field of study with the highest Social Security affiliation rate (94%) and the highest average contribution base in the entire university system, with 41,839 euros per year. These figures contrast with the perception of instability projected by the technology sector, and largely explain why health vocations They are gaining ground among young people planning their careers.
The report itself, however, reflects a paradox: although the demand for studies linked to health has not stopped growing (25% in the last seven years), the supply of university places has decreased by 0.4% in that same period, standing at 245,226 places offered in the 2024-2025 academic year.
Spain ages: healthcare workers are needed. Demographic aging in Spain is one of the reasons why the health sector has grown by 4% in the last year and faces a process of generational change since, according to data At Randstad, more than 50% of employees in this sector are over 45 years old. The demand for professionals continues to rise, driven by the need of a population increasingly older.
That is, unlike the technology sector, which in recent months has actively and passively demonstrated that it can lay off thousands of workersthe healthcare sector tends to require more and more staff and has low exposure to the impact of AI. Weighty arguments for a generation that, above any other consideration, what seeks is not to be out of work in the future.
In Xataka | Technological talent in Spain grows 4% annually. But they have to go to other countries to work
Image | Unsplash (Arif Riyanto, Aliburhan S)
A version of this topic was published in 2025. We have updated the data with figures from 2026 and also added new information.
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