New Jobs Emerging as the Labor Market Slows
Job Trends Analysis | New Stardom
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The global labour market is cooling, yet entirely new job titles are popping up that would have sounded like satire ten years ago. Billionaire nannies fly by private jet from Aspen to the Maldives. Professional line sitters sell their place in a queue. City governments hire chief heat officers. AI labs and automotive giants advertise for AI safety engineers and AI ethicists who sit between code, law and politics.
Behind the headlines there is a harder story. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that around 170 million new jobs will be created this decade, driven by technology, the green transition, demographic shifts and geopolitical shocks. At the same time, large shares of existing roles will be automated or re-designed. The International Labour Organization’s 2025 outlook describes a “new normal” of modest employment growth and ageing workforces, and has already cut its forecast for global employment growth in 2025 to around 1.5 percent.
So the question is which quirky roles are trending on TikTok and what these new jobs reveal about power, money and the labour market of the future.
Private service for billionaires: the nanny economy
The “billionaire nanny” has become a shorthand for a new tier of private service work around extreme wealth. The Guardian reports a boom in young graduates who skip entry-level corporate jobs to work as nannies for ultra-rich families, often on salaries of £120,000 to £150,000 a year plus travel on private jets, luxury housing and access to elite social circles.
These are 24/7 “private service” roles that blend childcare, logistics, travel choreography, tutoring, and often soft security work, all under strict NDAs and behaviour codes.
This tier of work is expanding because global wealth at the very top has grown far faster than median wages, while work has become more demanding for dual-earner professional households. Ultra-rich families outsource any task that consumes time or creates risk: child-rearing, schooling choices, online safety, social media presence and travel. IMF analysis of generative AI and inequality warns that high earners and high-skill roles may gain most from technological change, potentially widening income gaps. That same inequality fuels demand for “private staff” who absorb the friction and vulnerability of everyday life for the wealthy.
For workers, billionaire nanny jobs are both opportunity and trap. Salaries and lifestyle can beat many white-collar roles, but schedules are volatile, work is often live-in, boundaries blur, and bargaining power depends on discretion and personal trust, there is no clear professional ladder.
Personal queue liners and time brokers
Photo by Zhen Yao
Then there are th paid line standers, sometimes called professional line sitters or queue standers. The occupation has existed informally for years. Job boards like ZipRecruiter list hundreds of “professional line sitter” openings across large US cities, with hourly rates that can reach the equivalent of a mid-range service job. The Wall Street Journal reports that travellers and restaurant-goers are increasingly paying people to stand in line for them at theme parks, hot-ticket restaurants and high-demand attractions, outsourcing the inconvenience in exchange for guaranteed access and saved time. Clients with high opportunity-cost of time pay someone else to absorb the wait, whether it’s for visas, concerts, product launches or government appointments. At the same time, digital queue-management tools are reshaping the other end of the market, letting higher-income users bypass physical lines through apps and timed ticketing. What emerges is a split system, one group experiences “no queue,” and another is increasingly paid to stand in one.
Clients pay someone to queue for visas, limited-edition sneakers, immigration appointments, concerts, restaurant reservations or in-person government services. What they are really buying is a swap of time and risk. The person with a high opportunity cost of time pays someone with a lower opportunity cost to absorb boredom, rain and the risk of being turned away.
This is happening at the same time as physical queues are being quietly digitised. Queue management platforms now sell cloud-based systems where customers “take a ticket” from their phone, receive alerts and arrive only when close to their turn. Airports, hospitals, banks and municipal offices deploy visitor queue software and self-service kiosks to smooth flows and reduce visible waiting.
In other words, the queue is being split. Higher-income users increasingly experience “no queue” because software and staff rearrange time around them. Lower-income workers still queue, but some are paid to do it. “Personal queue liner” is just the logical end point in a world where time, not just labour, is commodified.
AI’s shadow jobs: from prompt engineer to AI ethicist and safety engineer
Generative AI has created a set of hybrid roles that sit between engineering, law, policy and content.
The flashy title of “prompt engineer” briefly became the symbol of this shift, with media coverage of salaries up to 300,000 or 400,000 dollars a year for people who could craft effective prompts. More recent analysis is cooler. A 2025 open source paper on AI job postings found only 72 dedicated prompt engineer positions across a large dataset of AI-related roles, less than half a percent of AI postings, suggesting that standalone prompt engineering is still a niche specialisation rather than a mainstream occupation. Industry commentary now argues that generic “prompt engineer” jobs are already becoming obsolete as interfaces improve, with prompt skills absorbed into broader roles such as data scientist, applied researcher or “content engineer”.
The more durable emerging roles sit around governance and safety. AI ethicists are standard in job description libraries, charged with embedding ethical, legal and human-rights considerations into AI development. They work with engineers and executives to reduce bias, protect privacy and ensure AI systems align with organisational values and regulation.
AI safety and alignment engineers go deeper into technical risk with job ads from companies like xAI and General Motors offering salaries in the 180,000 to 440,000 dollar range for engineers who can design and validate safety protocols for machine learning systems in autonomous vehicles and other high-risk applications. Safety researchers at labs and public institutes test models for dangerous capabilities, from cyberattacks to biological misuse. Time magazine’s profile of Jade Leung at the UK’s AI Safety Institute shows how this work is turning into a public-sector career track.
These jobs exist because regulators and the public are no longer willing to simply “move fast and break things”. IMF economists have warned that generative AI could disrupt both low-skill and high-skill roles and increase inequality unless education, reskilling and social protections catch up. That pressure is driving demand for people who can translate between technical models, compliance requirements and social risk.
Reading the signal: what these jobs have in common
Viewed together, billionaire nannies, professional queue liners, AI ethicists and chief heat officers do not look like a coherent labour market. One category serves billionaires directly. Another waits in line for people with less time. A third handles AI risks. A fourth manages urban heat and flood risk.
The common threads sit underneath the titles.
First, extreme inequality and ageing are reshaping demand. High-net-worth households and over-stretched professionals buy time and security from others. Ageing societies need more care, domestic and coordination work, but the quality of that work depends on regulation and bargaining power. OECD and ILO reports both underline the pressure that demographic change is putting on labour markets and social cohesion.The billionaire nanny is one of the visible outcomes.
Second, risk management is becoming its own labour market. AI safety engineers, AI ethicists and climate adaptation officers are employed to prevent things going wrong: biased algorithms, unsafe autonomous systems, lethal heatwaves. They translate complex technical systems into policies, dashboards and emergency plans. The WEF’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 lists analytical and creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and systems understanding among the most in-demand skills, exactly the mix that these roles require.
Third, the split between those who design systems and those who carry the friction is widening. Queue management platforms and appointment apps remove visible lines for those who are plugged into digital systems, while paid line sitters and other gig workers still spend hours offline to make those systems feel smooth for others. In AI, highly paid safety engineers and ethicists work upstream, while lower-paid annotators and content moderators still clean data and shield platforms from harm. Those “invisible” roles are harder to track in public data, but they are part of the same shift.
Finally, many of these “new jobs” are still fragile. Standalone prompt engineer roles may shrink into broader content and engineering roles. Some chief heat officer posts may be temporary or politically vulnerable. Demand for billionaire nannies depends on financial cycles, tax regimes and public backlash. That matters for workers planning careers: the signal is to watch the underlying function, not the buzzword.
For New Stardom’s readers, the strategic question is simple. Wherever you sit on the income ladder, the durable skills cut across these jobs: the ability to manage complex systems and risk, to work with data and AI tools, to communicate with very different stakeholders, and to operate with discretion in high-trust environments. Titles will change. Those capacities will not.
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