2022 Guide to Kickstarting Your Career: The top jobs and industries to launch your professional journey

I think one of the most common questions every child encounters is - What do you want to be when you grow up? About three decades ago when I first remember being asked this question at school, I was fascinated with the limitless possibilities my answer could explore. After rummaging through my 10-year-old brain, I found my answer. I wanted to be a doctor. I was proud of myself to have come up with a career choice which I was sure would make me stand out. Turns out more than half the students in the class of 60 wanted to pursue the same profession. Engineering was the second most popular choice.

It was not that this group was particularly tech savvy or united by a love for medicine. But, the truth was that not many were aware of career options outside of these fields. Things are no longer the same today, not by any stretch of imagination. Gen Z today has a host of opportunities - from building careers as influencers to enhanced opportunities for networking to monetise their business ideas. Really, we are inventing professions as we go! The other day I came across a profile with the designation ‘Chief Happiness Officer’. Now who could have thought that this would be a legitimate role to aspire for some day?

This fast-paced change in the field of work has been further accelerated by the pandemic. From the type of work to the way we work - the entire ecosystem has undergone a significant shift. For someone who’s just kickstarting their career, despite all the exciting opportunities, this can be a challenging time.?

Which are the fastest growing job titles for career starters today? Which industries are hiring for entry-level positions?

LinkedIn’s Economic Graph data reveals the job titles that saw the fastest growth in share of career starters hired in 2021 over 2020. A career starter is defined as someone with fewer than four years of full-time work experience and who has held fewer than three full-time jobs. A career starter also does not have a degree beyond a Bachelor’s.

Industries that saw the highest growth in share of career starters hired in 2021 over the previous year include hospitality, IT Services and IT Consulting and Business Consulting and Services. Check out the top jobs available for career starters in the top five industries on the list.

With work-from-home gaining prominence over the last two years, remote positions are finding more takers, especially among the younger generation. More than one in five people in the 20-24 years age group seeking employment applied for a remote position in 2022 (as of April 13). The number stood at 15.7% in 2021.

According to Kamal Karanth, co-founder of specialist staffing firm Xpheno, the trend of remote working permanently has also caught on as a result of the endorsement it received from the IT Services sector. The industry hired and onboarded just under a million freshers in remote working mode. Karanth says younger talent now has a method and proof of the doability and efficacy of the remote work model. With personal and social arrangements done around remote work, professionals, especially those who have just started their careers, would not want to let go of the comfort and flexibility.?

Senior professionals, meanwhile, have the reference of what work-from-office feels like. They also have fewer remote work options compared to the younger lot, Karanth says.

In fact, top talent at some companies are even choosing to quit jobs wherein they are asked to get back to the office. According to executive coach and author Abhijit Bhaduri, workplace practices are evolving to tap into the possibilities technology offers and what the talent pool is looking for. “Anywhere Anytime will have to be done simultaneously to address the customers and employees. These need investments in tech and skills. Managing a globally distributed workforce needs highly skilled managers who can deliver results even as they engage each remote employee,” he says. But while hybrid is here to stay, it will be a while before it becomes the default norm.

Methodology

A Career Starter is a member who satisfies all of the below:

• Has at most 4 years of full-time work experience (excluding internships)
• Does not have a degree higher than a Bachelor’s degree
• Has not held more than 3 full-time jobs
• Is working in an entry-level job

How did we gather skills data (methodology for external use)?

Skills data was calculated by examining skills listed by members who have worked in the role, and were adjusted and transformed to surface the most unique skills for each role in the country.

Fast-Growing Jobs: We collected all entry-level hires from 2020 and 2021, calculated the share of hiring of each job for each year. We ranked jobs based on the highest growth in the share of hiring. To filter out jobs with low hiring, we filtered out jobs that had fewer than 50 hires in 2021. We also looked at the top five companies that hired the most number of Career Starters in that job in 2021.

Fast-Growing Industries: We selected all Level 2 industries? that had at least 20 hires in 2021. We applied the same methodology as we did for Fast Growing Jobs and ranked the industries by their growth, as measured by year-over-year change in their share of hires of Career Starters.

Popularity of Remote Jobs by Age: The results use member age, which can be either explicitly given to us by the member or calculated by inferring from their profile data (i.e. based on high school or college graduation year). The age bracket is the age of the member at the time they applied for a remote job. The data for 2022 was collected up until April 13, 2022.