Which jobs are future-proofed?
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What is the Occupational Outlook Handbook and why does it matter for job security?
This
is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. On this Labor Day Monday, we're naturally thinking about the American workforce. With so much economic uncertainty in the air, from AI to tariffs, it can be hard to know just what the future holds for our careers or the broader labor market. Luckily, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is something of a crystal ball in what's called the Occupational Outlook Handbook. Today on the show, we're re-airing one of our favorite episodes all about this obscure government report. After the break, Darren Woods and I get to the bottom of whether we can actually predict what jobs are future-proofed.
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The other day we heard from a listener. My name is Asa Hess-Mazzamotto, and I work as an application security engineer.
That means Asa keeps our apps safe from hackers and viruses. And he also moonlights as a teaching assistant at Georgia Tech. He's used to fielding questions about job prospects.
fair in this new AI vibe coding world. You have career changers, students, new graduates. And, you know, I try as best as I'm able to, to provide like sort of empirically backed guidance.
Asus says he finds one section of the BLS website quite useful for those hard numbers. It's the BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook. There, he can look up jobs like the one he does, Information Security Analyst. He sees things like its median wage.
$125,000?
And you can see where these jobs are most plentiful.
Virginia and California.
He can also see the projected job growth to the year 2034. 29%
growth.
That's a lot of analysts.
Yes.
His job is
safe. Well, this lodged a question in Ace's mind.
How is that done? How is that estimate made? And has there been any follow-up to determine how accurate these estimations and projections have aligned with the real-world data once time catches up?
So at the top of the BLS's list for future job growth is nurse practitioner, solar photovoltaic installer, and wind turbine service technician.
Ooh, you did that once for a day for an episode, remember? You put on your steel-toed boots, you climbed up a windmill.
It was the height of the Statue of Liberty.
Oh, my gosh.
And where I didn't go was the bottom of the BLS list, which is roles like teller or desktop publisher, bill and account collectors. Those jobs are projected to decrease.
Sarah Mattson is an economist at the BLS. Sarah does the work looking at trends in the labor market. But, you know, she's not like a psychic.
If I could make every exact prediction in a crystal ball, I would not be working here. I would have won the lottery by now. Sarah says the way the Bureau calculates job growth starts at looking at overall trends in the U.S. Factors such as the general aging of the population and general population change and stuff like that.
Then Sarah's colleagues extrapolate the historical trends for jobs within the different industries. Like maybe home health and personal care aides are growing at a faster rate than, say, physicians and surgeons.
But there's no amount of historical data that can project trends that don't yet exist in the historical data. AI, of course, is a great example of that. So that's where my team comes in and we apply our research to those initial estimates to kind of move them as we see appropriate for the project. emerging trends.
So for our listener Asa's job, information security analyst, that's expected to grow.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the Occupational Outlook Handbook and why does it matter for job security?
0:00–6:56
2
How does Asa Hess‑Mazzamotto use BLS data to evaluate his career as an information security analyst?
6:56–9:47
3
Which occupations are projected to grow the most and which are expected to decline?
9:47–10:17
Speakers
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