Economic Perspective: Jobs In the Next Decade

MARY WALDEN:

“Today’s program looks at the next decade in jobs. Mike, the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics just released their national job forecast for the next decade. Give us the highlights of the report.”

MIKE WALDEN:

“Well the Bureau of Labor Statistics does this every year. They come up with a new forecast for how the job market is going to perform over the next 10 years. So their new forecast is for the period of 2019 to 2029. They are predicting that over that period of time we are going to have a net, a net, of new job creation number of six million.”

“Now that might sound like a lot, but on an annualized basis that’s a growth rate over that 10 year period of only .4 percent annually, and that is well below the 1.3 percent annual growth rate in jobs we had from 2009 to 2019. So we’re looking ahead for yes more jobs, but they’re going to be growing at a very tortuously low rate. Now why is that?”

“Well, I think because we’re going to have a slower growth rate in the labor force. We now have more people retiring, the so-called Baby Boom workers are retiring – Baby Boom generation. At the same time we have a slowing of new people coming into the labor force because we’ve had very, very low growth rates in recent years.”

“Now in terms of where the jobs are going to be growing the fastest look for fast growth in healthcare fields, energy and information analysis.”

Walden is a William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor and Extension Economist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University who teaches and writes on personal finance, economic outlook and public policy.