Farmers, fishermen and office clerks will become a rare breed in Europe, but there will be millions of new jobs in service industries for highly skilled and educated people, a European Union study showed yesterday.

The study, conducted by the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, forecast a net addition of more than 13 million new jobs by 2015, of which an overwhelming majority would be for people with the highest qualifications.

"Skilled agricultural and fishery workers still accounted for almost 10 million jobs in 1996 but this is declining steadily and by 2015 is likely to be not much more than half that figure," the study said.

The number of people in crafts will also continue to decline as new technologies take over - a trend that will also cut some 500,000 jobs in manufacturing to 33,431,000 in 2015 .

"Clerks are another group where technology has at last begun to bite," the study said, forecasting a decline of 1.85 million in the number of clerical jobs to 16.94 million by 2015.

Instead Europe will need 2.67 million new managers, legislators and senior officials, almost a million new engineers, close to another million teachers and hundreds of thousands of people in the healthcare sector.

Out of Europe's 210 million employed, some 80 million are already in higher level jobs such as management, some kind of professional work or technical support for those activities and their number will grow, the study said.

The number of jobs in business and miscellaneous services such as distribution, transport, hotels and catering will grow the fastest, adding nine million jobs over the next eight years.

Prospects for a career in finance are dimming.

"Banking and insurance have seen declining employment shares despite rising output levels as technology has reduced the number of jobs in many areas," the report said.

The EU, which now has 27 members, wants to transform its economy to become more knowledge-based and has stressed the need for life-long learning programmes to help workers adapt to changing skills requirements.