Making the leap: career switchers find a new future in these 10 industries

A few years ago, they were baristas, bank tellers or bingo supervisors at casinos. They were rattling around in the kinds of entry-level jobs that people take during college or right afterward, because nothing better has come along.?

But all of them had ambitions for something better.?

For all these career starters -- and many more -- the winning ticket has involved a career switch into logistics: the vast, indispensable grouping of jobs that involve keeping America’s supply chain working smoothly. That’s no longer just the realm of truck drivers and warehouse workers. It’s also a field with a booming assortment of white-collar and managerial openings where pay is good; training is rapid and opportunities keep growing.

Logistics, in fact, ranks No. 1 in a new analysis of industries attracting people who previously worked in other sectors. That study, conducted by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team, compared recent job-switching patterns (July through September 2021) with the same three-month period in 2019. All told, more than 700,000 career moves were analyzed.?

As the chart above shows, it’s becoming increasingly common for people to uproot themselves from one industry -- so they can relaunch themselves in a new field. Such career pivots are important; they can account for roughly a third to half of overall job changes. And in the past two years, they’ve risen briskly in fields ranging from software to finance.

Even in popular industries, the flow of talent goes in both directions. Transportation and logistics has seen a 34.9% increase in career switchers coming into the field -- but also a 30.8% rise in people leaving this industry to try something different.

Two way flows are especially strong in wellness and fitness, for example, with a 30.4% jump in people entering the field, along with a 35.8% surge in people leaving. That may reflect the field’s popularity with career starters, who welcome the chance to earn living wages as yoga instructors, etc. for a year or two en route to something else.

Healthcare is another example of a field that has top-10 pulling power for people coming in from other industries (27.2% growth) while also seeing high attrition rates (34.4% increase). In that case, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted career paths in multiple ways.

A survey conducted earlier this year by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that roughly 30% of healthcare workers have weighed leaving their profession. Nearly 60% say stress from the pandemic has harmed their mental health.

All the same, hospitals and medical practices continue to have strong hiring needs, and job fairs in healthcare are explicitly reaching out to people who “want to get back into the workforce .” While it can take many years to qualify as a doctor or registered nurse, requirements are lighter for less sophisticated jobs.

In fast-growing fields such as software and information technology, migration into the field (up 34.7%) is outpacing departures (up 20.9%). Strong pay rates and the chance to build up always-in-demand job skills explain the allure.?

Many newcomers with non-traditional backgrounds gain training through intense bootcamps, such as ClimbHire , that deliver digital skills faster and more affordably than classic academic programs.?

As ClimbHire CEO Nitzan Pelman recently explained to Forbes , participants in her program arrive with average annual earnings of just $24,000, often from work such as ride-share driving or front-line retail. After five months of training, they land jobs in fields such as IT and database management, paying an average of $61,000 a year.

Media, surprisingly, is another field where newcomers from other industries are increasing far more rapidly (+29.9%) than the rate of people leaving for other fields (+12.8%). It may well be that the long-chronicled exodus of talent from shrinking sectors such as newspapers and TV stations has largely run its course.

Meanwhile, constant growth in the social-media sector -- especially the current boom in demand for creators -- is likely to be bringing in fresh talent from all over. It’s worth noting that successful careers in media can be launched without any formal credentials or costly training. Self-taught wizards at TikTok or YouTube can enter the field at will, no matter what they were doing before.

Which fields aren’t having much luck attracting more talent from other industries? The three with the lowest two-year trends for hiring career switchers are energy and mining (-4.4%), public administration (+5.6%) and education (+7.8%). All three have seen a rising exodus of talent for other industries, at rates of 25% or more.?

Because this analysis focuses on two-year trends, the chaos of 2020’s labor markets isn’t immediately visible. But a month-by-month look at talent migration trends shows how much job mobility dried up in the spring and summer of 2020, amid COVID-related restrictions and widespread layoffs or furloughs.?

Talent migration rates in the April 2020 to July 2020 span fell 40% or more in many cases, before staging a brisk rebound in the latter part of 2020, which generally has continued into the present.?

Methodology

Job transitions are calculated from updates to LinkedIn profiles. Trends reflect similar periods (July through September) in 2021 and 2019. First jobs, student jobs, side jobs and internships are not included. Coverage is limited to industries with at least 5,000 transitions in the latest period. LinkedIn data scientist Brian Xu contributed to this report.