Which jobs are future-proofed?

0:00NPR. This is the Inticator from Planet Money I'm Whalen 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, and what's called the occupational outlook handbook. Today in 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 our future proved. Support for NPR and the following message come from Rippling. Our sales team is at risk of missing quota. Don't panic. Just ask Rippling AI.

1:00Built on your real-time people in business data, Rippling AI instantly pulls metrics from Rippling and your CRM into a meeting-ready dashboard so you can see what's behind your quota risk and fix it before it's missed. Head to Rippling.ai-slash-indicator to get an AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your business. How did we get here? That's a question we have been trying to answer a lot here at NPR. We are exploring global histories on throughline. We're hearing from national security experts on sources and methods. We're watching the markets with planet money. You can support this work across all our podcasts with NPR Plus. Find out more at plus.npr.org. The other day we heard from a listener. My name is Asa Haszimato and I work as an application security engineer. That means Asa keeps our apps save from hackers and viruses. He also moonlights as a teaching assistant at Georgia Tech. He's used to fielding questions about job prospects.

2:01Fifth, in this new AI vibe coding world. You have career changers, students, new graduates. I try as best as I'm able to provide empirically backed guidance. Asa 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 analysts. He sees things like its median wage. $125,000. And he 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 Asa's mind. How is that done? How is that estimate made? And has there been any follow-up to determine how accurate these estimations projections have aligned with the real world data once time catches up?

3:05So 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 stature 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 Matzen 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 We The Bureau calculates job growth starts at looking at overall trends in the US. Factors such as the general aging of the population and general population changes up like that. Then Sarah's colleagues extrapolate the historical trends for jobs within the different industries.

4:06Like maybe home health and personal care aids are growing at a faster rate than say physicians and surgeons. 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 emerging trends. So for our listener, Aces job, information security analyst, that's expected to grow. The BLS writes, cyber attacks have grown in frequency and these analysts will be needed. Bad for the world, but good for Aces cyber security students. Yeah, the BLS is bullish on both scams and cyber security students. Yes. But that gets us to Aces second question. How reliable have the BLS projections been? Economist Max C. Massincoff has written a paper answering this very question. Max C. recently moved from academia to AI. He now works for Anthropic.

5:08With all the developments in AI, I got really curious about will this job still be around and how good would advice be based on these kinds of job forecasts? Maxine's research began by looking just after World War II. That's when millions of young veterans had returned home from Europe in the Pacific. The US government wanted to help them decide what careers to pursue. So it made the first occupational outlook report in 1946. They had a really wide circulation. The circulation in the US approached that of like a New York Times best seller. And that popularity remains. It's the most visited section of the BLS website today. The report has been updated every few years since and it highlights trends that might affect jobs like when the US highway system was being built out from the 1950s. These huge construction projects would unearth a lot of artifacts. And so the BLS predicted that demand for archaeologists would go up.

6:11In the 50s and 60s, the handbook predicted more veterinarians as more people moved to the suburbs. They'd have a lot more space and they'd be more likely to have a pet dog. Even trends for men having longer hair in the 1970s. The prediction for decreased demand for barbers. People didn't need to get their hair cut as often. Some assessments haven't aged as well. Like in the 1940s, the report offered a fairly benign outlook for telegraph operators. It said the downward trend of employment expected in the occupation over the long run will probably not be sharp enough to cause heavy prolonged layoffs. That sounds like a misprediction for me. So Maxine tell it up the overall scoreboard. Electrical order of the projections from the 1940s through to the 1990s. And then he checked them against how the jobs actually did down the line. These predictions are really strongly correlated with the employment trajectories. If you choose a job that the outlook was really optimistic about, there would be much higher growth in the occupation in the next 10 or 20 years.

7:13When Maxine found that the top third of jobs that were projected to grow the fastest did grow a lot. They rose by 57% over two decades. The bottom third of projected jobs actually grew by only 12%. How much of this accurate record could have just been done by looking at our fast jobs are growing now and then assuming that they'll continue growing at the same rate. Maxine found that existing job trends did account for a lot of that forecasting power. Right. So if warehousing jobs are growing a lot last decade, they're likely to continue growing next decade. That might be due to the continued rise of online shopping. These things at least historically have just unfolded slowly. That said, Maxine says the BLS did add value. When you compare them head to head, the occupational outlook wins out a little bit. So if you had to just choose one source, you would still go with the BLS. The BLS does its own backwards looking assessments of how accurate its projections have been. And Sarah Mattson from the agency says that the most recent evaluation shows

8:15that the BLS correctly projected whether an occupational group would grow or shrink almost 70% of the time. And that's all available on our website for anyone to take a look at. People like our listener, Aisa Hes Batumoto, as we heard, he was wondering if he could rely on the BLS projections when talking to the next generation of cybersecurity analysts. Well, he can rest assured the BLS has a pretty good track record. We told Aisa what we learned and actually have an answer for you. Great. Yeah. We explained that the BLS takes long term job trends and extends them. Then it boosts these up and down depending on new technological or social changes and evaluations afterwards show their reasonably accurate. What do you think? I'm pretty impressed that it's that accurate given how far out that the cast and how even looking back at the last few years things have changed.

9:15That's incredible. That's really incredible. Do you want us to take your question? email us, indicator at NPR.org. This episode was produced by Corey Bridges with the Engineering by Jimmy Keely, who's factored by Sierra Juarez, taking care of edits to show and the indicator is a production of NPR. This message comes from Jackson Financial. Whether you're planning to spend more time with family or travel the world, Jackson wants to help set you up for success. Guaranteed lifetime income can help secure the retirement you want. Visit Jackson.com to learn more. Jackson is short for Jackson Financial Incorporated, Jackson National Life Insurance Company, Lansing, Michigan, and Jackson National Life Insurance Company of New York, Purchase New York. Guarantees are backed by the claims paying ability of the issuing insurance company. I'm Jesse Thorn. On Bullseye, American football. They're one of the world's most beloved email bands. And they know that their songs are pretty emo.

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