The Hottest Jobs In The Next Decade

Filed in archive Education , Parenting on May 31, 2010

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If you have a child who is in his or her early teens and is into the sciences and mathematics, that child may find it very easy to get a job ten years from now. According to the Labor Department's 10-year forecast published in April of this year, engineering and health care are expected to be the fastest-growing areas as far as demand for workers and salaries offered are concerned. Job opportunities for doctors will be plenty while those who want to be attorneys and architects will most likely meet the stiffest competition. There will also be an increased need for psychologists, especially in organizational and industrial areas.

The predictions have their limits. The Labor Department assumes that the economy will go up in the long run and that there won't be major recessions like the one we had in 2007-2008. So big job-market swings or sudden changes in the supply of workers that usually take place in a volatile economy are not included in the forecast.

The predictions also include a decline in the demand for nurses simply because of the rapidly growing supply. Thousands of nurses who have retired have been re-entering the work force due to the ongoing recession.

Similarly,the dot-com collapse has been held responsible for the slump in the demand for new computer programmers.

And of course, there are jobs that up to now are still evolving. We still don't know, for example, how important bioengineering will play as we try to develop biofuels and fuel cell technologies.

Demand for biomedical engineers is expected to grow by as much as 72%, while prospective network system analysts will see jobs increasing by as much as 53%. Other hot jobs making up the top five include those in the areas of home health care (46%), financial examiners (41%), and medical scientists (40%).