Jobs Outlook to 2024: Encouraging or Disappointing? (Part 2)

Part 2 of 3

Last month the Bureau of Labor Statistics released their Projections of Occupational Employment 2014– 2024. They do an excellent job presenting and explaining the information.

So you may wonder, are the projections good news or bad news for the US workforce? Lately we have seen a mix of good and bad news about the economy. The same can be said about the national occupational employment projections.

In my last post we discussed improvements in the job market since the onset of the Great Recession. Now let’s look at the projections for future growth.

• First the bad news: Ten-year job growth projections have slowed dramatically over the last several projection cycles—down to 6.5%, half of the optimistic 13% growth projection from 10 years ago.
• Now the good news: Projections of growth in the number of new workers have also slowed considerably. For example, the number of workers in the US labor force is projected to increase by only about 7.8 million between 2014 and 2024. That is good news for those of us in the labor force because jobs are projected to grow faster than the increase in workers to fill those jobs—faster by nearly 2 million over 10 years. If the projections are accurate, we should be worried not for workers, but rather for employers who are already reporting difficulty finding skilled workers. (Of course we cannot take these projections as predictions. If you read my last post, you saw how 10-year projections can really miss their mark.)

You may have heard that most of the recent growth has been in low-wage jobs. My next post will discuss whether that is really true.