Robots. Cyberthreats. Substance abuse. These are some of the factors driving hiring in the most rapidly growing jobs in the United States, according to a new report from LinkedIn identifying the top 15 “emerging jobs.”
LinkedIn, a social network for professionals owned by Microsoft, used its data to identify the top 15 jobs that have emerged over the last five years, as well as the skills uniquely associated with them.
Here’s the list:
- Artificial Intelligence Specialist (74% annual growth)
- Robotics Engineer (40% annual growth)
- Data Scientist (37% annual growth)
- Full Stack Engineer (35% annual growth)
- Site Reliability Engineer (34% annual growth)
- Customer Success Specialist (34% annual growth)
- Sales Development Representative (34% annual growth)
- Data Engineer (33% annual growth)
- Behavioral Health Technician (32% annual growth)
- Cybersecurity Specialist (30% annual growth)
- Back End Developer (30% annual growth)
- Chief Revenue Officer (28% annual growth)
- Cloud Engineer (27% annual growth)
- JavaScript Developer (25% annual growth)
- Product Owner (24% annual growth)
While the tech sector accounts for a large share of these jobs, LinkedIn notes that not all of the in-demand jobs in the tech sector are technical or engineering jobs. For example, people skills are essential for the roles of product owner, customer success specialist, and sales development representative.
LinkedIn Economist Guy Berger comments, “Demand for soft skills is likely to increase as automation becomes more widespread. Skills like communication, creativity, and collaboration are all virtually impossible to automate, which means if you have these skills you’ll be even more valuable to organizations in the future.”
One of the only non-tech sector roles to make the list, Behavioral Health Technician, is likely in high demand because of increased health insurance coverage for mental health and substance abuse treatment, LinkedIn said.
Many of these jobs involve “working with patients who have autism or behavioral disorders and working with children in school environments.” The job doesn’t require a specific degree.
The Emerging Jobs list is by no means comprehensive for the U.S. economy overall as it relies exclusively on user data from the LinkedIn platform. The methodology involves analyzing public profiles of LindedIn members, including the full-time positions that they’ve held over the past five years.
Once the talent pool has been identified, LinkedIn then calculates the share of hiring and the compound annual growth rate of this proportion for each occupation between 2015 and 2019 to identify the roles with the largest growth.
