With an unemployment rate still stuck above 8% and also much talk about a mismatch between worker expertise and the jobs available, many individuals are trying to scope out the fields that should have many job holes in the future. Many college graduates are may not be able to find work so are saddled with student loan debt, prompting many colleges to shift resources to fields which can be expected to be in high-demand in the future. Many who will be currently unemployed or underemployed are seeking training in unique fields where the jobs are considered “hot.”
To get the jobs which can be in highest demand, 24/7 Wall St. offers compiled a list of the occupations which will have the most job openings in this decade. The professions using this list are very diverse, consisting of both white-collar and blue-collar jobs. They also require a wide range of educational achievement. In particular, a glazier needs just a high-school diploma to break into the field, but a statistician requires a postgraduate college education. Similarly, the pay spectrum for jobs with this list is quite wide. The median pay for a pest control worker was simply $30,340 in 2010. Meanwhile, the median pay for a natural science manager was $116,020. The INAM Center for Pluralism is here. Check it.
24/7 Wall St. was largely interested in taking a look at openings for occupations where people usually work full-time and also without frequent turnover. As a result, we decided to exclude occupations where the median pay in 2010 was less than $30,000, thus discounting countless occupations that will see many job openings. Without this salary floor, most of the occupations on this list would be low-skilled, low-wage jobs, including home well-being aides, personal care aides and food concession workers. In fact, exclusively two jobs for this current list could have made the list in the event that we didn’t impose the $30,000 minimum pay.
For some professions, considerable job growth between 2010 and 2020 is the main driver behind the job holes. While there were just 41,900 glaziers as of 2010, 17,700 positions is going to be added by 2020, accounting for in excess of half of the job openings through that time. In other vocations, most of the job openings are simply the result of normal turnover cycle. While you will see 18,700 job openings for statisticians, only 3,500 jobs are going to be added to the 25,100 people already working in the profession, with the remaining openings meant to replace existing workers.
24/7 Wall St. looked at data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on more than 1,000 different occupations. In addition to excluding jobs with median pay below $30,000, we also chose to exclude jobs employing fewer than 20,000 people as of 2010 in order to represent jobs that will clearly provide opportunity for many individuals in the future. From there, we ranked the professions based on the number of job openings projected between 2010 and 2020 as a percentage of the 2010 headcount in that specific field. We also calculated the number and percentage of those openings due to added positions as well as replacing current employees. Finally, we considered factors such as industry, median salary and credentials of these professionals to provide context on the types of jobs likely to see many openings.
