____ Introduction
Like the earnings fi gures, the fi gures on projected growth and job openings are reported
according to the SOC classifi cation. So, again, we had to exclude a few jobs from this
book because this information is not available for them. As with earnings, some of
the SOC jobs crosswalk to more than one O*NET job. To continue the example we
used earlier, the Department of Labor projects growth (17.7%) and openings (134,463)
for one SOC occupation called Accountants and Auditors, but in the Part IV job
descriptions, we report these fi gures separately for the O*NET occupation Accountants
and for the O*NET occupation Auditors. When you see that Accountants has a 17.7%
projected growth rate and 134,463 projected job openings and Auditors has the same
two numbers, you should realize that the 17.7% rate of projected growth represents the
average of these two occupations—one may actually experience higher growth than the
other—and that these two occupations will share the 134,463 projected openings.! e Department of Labor provides a single fi gure (22.9%) for the projected growth of 38
postsecondary teaching jobs and also provides a single fi gure (237,478) for the projected
annual job openings for these 38 jobs. Because these college-teaching jobs are related to two
diff erent RIASEC types—Investigative and Social—and because separate earnings fi gures
are available for each of the 38 jobs, we thought you’d appreciate having these jobs appear
separately in the Part III lists in this book. If the trends of the last several years continue,
none of these jobs can be expected to grow or take on workers at a faster rate than the other37.! erefore, in preparing the lists and in the Part IV descriptions, we assumed that all
of these college-teaching jobs share the same rate of projected job growth, 22.9%, and we
computed a fi gure for their projected job openings by dividing the total (237,478) into 38
parts, each of which is proportional in size to the current workforce of the job.
While salary fi gures are fairly straightforward, you may not know what to make of job-
growth fi gures. For example, is projected growth of 15% good or bad? Keep in mind that
the average (mean) growth projected for all occupations by the Bureau of Labor Statistics
is 10.4%. One-quarter of the SOC occupations have a growth projection of 3.2% or lower.
Growth of 11.6% is the median, meaning that half of the occupations have more, half less.
Only one-quarter of the occupations have growth projected at more than 17.4%.
Because the jobs in this book were selected as “best” partly on the basis of job growth, their
mean growth is 13.9%, which compares favorably to the mean for all jobs. Among these
283 SOC jobs, the job ranked 71st by projected growth has a fi gure of 22.9%, the job
ranked 141st (the median) has a projected growth of 15.4%, and the job ranked 212th has a
projected growth of 10.6%.! e number of job openings for the 283 best jobs is slightly lower than the national average
for all occupations.! e Bureau of Labor statistics projects an average of about 35,000 job
openings per year for the 750 occupations that it studies, but for the 283 SOC occupations
included in this book, the average is about 35,700 openings.! e job ranked 71st for job
openings has a fi gure of about 37,800 annual openings, the job ranked 141st (the median)
has about 14,300 openings projected, and the job ranked 212th has about 5,600 openings
projected.