How we came up with our list of the best jobs of the future
The above 30 jobs both pay above the median annual wage and are poised to grow over the next decade.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases annual employment projections of how various jobs will grow or decline over the next decade. The latest release shows how occupations could change from 2021 to 2031. Overall, BLS forecasts that employment will grow by 8.3 million, from 158.1 million in 2021 to 166.5 million in 2031.
Insider was interested in looking at jobs that pay well and that also may see more jobs added over the decade. To come up with our set of jobs that are projected to have bright futures ahead of them, we took the geometric mean of median annual wages and projected employment growth from 2021 to 2031 for each occupation. We then ranked occupations based on their geometric mean. A higher geometric mean would mean a higher rank.
Wage data is for May 2021 from the Bureau’s Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. We only included jobs that pay over $45,760, the median wage for all occupations, because we were interested in jobs that are both expected to grow and pay well. We excluded job titles from our analysis that are catchall occupation titles, such as “computer occupations, all other.” Based on our analysis, several of the top jobs are medical, tech, or manager positions.
With 2021 being the base year for the latest projection, there are some important caveats to keep in mind given the labor market was still recovering from pandemic-related job losses during that year.
“The 2021 annual average levels do not reflect much of the employment recovery and reallocation that has already occurred in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying recession, given total employment continued to grow rapidly through the first half of 2022,” BLS wrote in a news release about 2021-2031 employment projections.
BLS also noted about the data in the release that “fast growth rates in this projections set can be cyclically driven, structurally driven (in the long term), or driven by a combination of cyclical and structural factors.”
This article was originally published in September 2021.
