Of the following 19 industry sectors, which do you think is projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to account for the most jobs in 2022?
Mining
Construction
Manufacturing
Utilities
Wholesale trade
Retail trade
Transportation and warehousing
Information
Financial activities
Professional and business services
Educational services
Health care and social assistance
Leisure and hospitality
Other services
Federal government
State and local government
Agriculture wage and salary
Agriculture self-employed and unpaid family workers
Nonagriculture self-employed and unpaid family workers
That would be health care and social assistance (13.6%), followed closely by professional and business services (13.3%) and state and local government (12.4%). In an article on industry employment and output projections by Richard Henderson of the BLS (December, 2013), by 2022, the top three sectors will account for roughly 40% of jobs.
I was recently poking around doing some general research and decided to take a look at industry trends. Sometimes it is good to just step back from the business and look at what is going on out there in the jungle.
Although the article presents the data in a nice table, I wanted a picture. Particularly, I wanted to see (a) what the trends have been in each industry and (b) which industries are projected to have the most growth into the future. After a quick reformatting of the data in LibreOffice Calc I pulled up my trusty (but lately a bit dusty) Tableau Public data visualization software to make a pretty picture with.
The chart below shows the 19 sectors sorted from the smallest 2022 job projection number (in thousands of jobs) on the left to largest on the right. I used a line for easier visualization of the trend in each sector from 2002 to 2012 to 2022. The colors depict the type of industry sector (e.g. "Goods producing" or "Service providing") and you can filter by year.
There is definitely an 80/20-like curve here. You might want to keep an eye on these sectors and think about how you can take advantage of that growth.
What are your key takeaways?
Need help pulling together research for your business?
