Child care worker
Also called day care worker, preschool worker, preschool teacher
Child care workers provide care for children when the parents or family members are unavailable. They look after the children's basic needs and help or supervise them during play. Child care workers can work for preschools, daycare centres, childcare agencies or individual families.
What you'd do
Child care workers · ILO- Assisting children to wash, dress and feed themselves
- Taking children to and from school or outdoors for recreation
- Playing games with children, or entertaining them by reading or storytelling
- Assisting in the preparation of materials and equipment for children's education and recreational activities
- Managing children's behaviour and guiding their social development
- Disciplining children and recommending or initiating other measures to control behaviour, such as caring for own clothing and picking up toys and books
- Observing and monitoring children's play activities
- Keeping records on individual children, including daily observations and information about activities, meals served, and medications administered
- Indoors
- A mix of sitting and standing
- Constant contact with people
- Good freedom to decide
- Usually 40 hours a week
- Deadlines now and then
- Varied tasks, little repetition
Will there be jobs?
Average prospectsA typical number of jobs will need filling by 2035.
Solid: measured. Dashed: forecast.
What does it pay?
Below averagePay depends a lot on the country: from about €900 a month (Bulgaria) to €4,700 (Luxembourg), before tax.
Pick a country at the top of the page to see typical pay there, for people under 30, and compared with all jobs.
Among service and sales workers in the EU, women earn 3% less per hour than men. Service and sales workers · Eurostat
What do I need to study?
Upper secondary or vocationalUpper secondary or vocational training in child care and youth services is the usual route.
Pick a country at the top of the page to see where to study and the official course finders.
Will AI change it?
Very littleAI could help with only small parts of the tasks.
Average task score 0.19 on a scale from 0 (AI can't do it) to 1 (AI could do it fully).
See the score for each of the 8 tasks
Based on what AI could technically do when assessed in 2025. It is not a forecast for a future year, and not a forecast of job losses. Scores for child care workers. Source: ILO (2025), adapted (credits).