What's your stress level? Each industry, from arts to tech, has its own profile

Melissa Kelly knows how to create an exciting, high-energy photo shoot. She’s spent much of her career as an in-demand professional photographer in the Philadelphia area, shooting everything from weddings to campus events and marketing brochures. As recently as 2019, everything was going her way.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Her gross revenue skidded 80% in 2020, as business dried up. Her favorite techniques -- fitting lots of people into the image, close together -- became off limits. Social distancing rules sometimes? forced her to compose shots from across the street.

Business has bounced back a bit this year, Kelly says, particularly as she reconnects with? long-time clients who urgently need their marketing materials updated. But live-event shoots remain scarce. “Overall,” she says, “I’m probably halfway back to where I was in 2019.”

For people in artistic fields -- whether that’s craftspeople, on-stage photographers or photographers like Kelly -- stress levels remain uniquely high. Creating great work in tricky settings is tough enough. Add in anxieties about making enough money, as well as the risks of COVID, and everything gets harder still.

No matter what industry you call home, the latest edition of LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence survey highlights the different faces of stress across the U.S. economy. These findings span nearly two dozen industries. They are based on polling of 19,897 LinkedIn members from July 31 through September 24.

As the chart above shows, stress levels correlate closely with where you work. COVID-related restrictions have been most disruptive in industries where indoor, face-to-face contact is the norm. That’s reflected by the fact that in fields such as healthcare, education or recreation and travel, stress levels are highest.?

Stress is noticeably lower in fields where it’s easier to work from home or in other remote settings. These include finance, media, software and information-technology services. And stress levels might be slightly lower still (subject to margin-of-error statistical considerations) in fields such as construction, energy or mining, where outdoor work is the norm.

The Workforce Confidence analysis digs even deeper, though. It analyzes the ways that different types of stress vary across industries. COVID concerns are an important part of the picture, but so, too, are worries related to insufficient income -- or an overload of tasks that must get done.

Analyzing the interplay of all these factors, LinkedIn market research expert Alexandra Gunther has identified seven distinct stress profiles that define the full sweep of U.S. industries. They are:?

• High risk; low reward
• Overwhelming but safe
• Overwhelming and dangerous
• Tight on money
• Low to moderate stress
• Fair work with some risk
• Hectic but thriving

Here’s a fuller look at each of those profiles -- and the industries that each one encompasses.

High risk; low reward: These are the fields where COVID worries are intense, along with stresses related to not making enough money. This profile encompasses arts, recreation and travel, consumer goods and retail, as well as wellness and fitness.

Money anxieties were most intense among people in the arts (50%), while registering at 34% or higher for the other four sectors. For retail work especially, low pay has been a sore spot for a long time. It’s now creating labor shortages, and prompting many retailers to offer raises or sign-on bonuses.?

Meanwhile, when asked if possible on-the-job exposure to COVID was among their top three sources of stress, 26% of people working in the arts said yes. That was among? the highest percentages for any industry surveyed. The others in this category all were at 19% or higher.??

Overwhelming but safe: This category covers design, legal and corporate services such as consulting. In these fields, concern about work-based COVID risks was rare, while anxieties about not making enough money were slightly higher than some other industries, but not strikingly so.?

The big stressors here involved feelings that there wasn’t enough time in the day to get everything done. That concern about overwork affected 40% of people working in design and legal, along with 37% of those in corporate services.

Overwhelming and dangerous: This is the high-stress world of people working in education, health care and administration. Educators worried most about on-the-job COVID exposure (27%) -- higher even than the 22% of healthcare workers with similar concerns. Educators (41%) also were most likely to cite stresses related to work overloads.

Tight on money: That’s the predominant worry of people working in entertainment (45%).?As Mathew Knowles (father of Beyonce!) told The New York Times earlier this year, now that? live performances have been scaled back so much, “even A-list artists and some of the big acts that have enormous overhead are struggling.”?

Low to moderate stress: The key industries here are real estate, media and communications, transportation and logistics, and finance. There’s mild concern in real estate and media about not making enough money, but overall, severe stress is relatively light in these lines of work.

Fair work with some risk: This applies to nonprofit and public safety work. There’s some concern about on-the-job exposure to COVID, but fewer worries about pay or workloads.?

Hectic but thriving: This is the land of boots and bytes. Three physically taxing industries are clustered here: construction and manufacturing, along with energy and mining. They’re joined by two types of knowledge-based tech work: software and IT services, as well as hardware and networking.?

In all these areas, work-related COVID concerns are rare, while jitters about pay are -- shall we say -- not a problem. Respondents do express concern about not having enough time to get everything done, with that concern being especially intense in construction (42%).??

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How does everything look versus late 2020? In the face of all that's changed since then -- both heartening and distressing -- overall stress has broadly held steady. Stress as tracked by the Workforce Confidence surveys has risen in five industries, led by public safety and arts. Meanwhile, stress has diminished in five other industries, with legal and wellness and fitness being the most pronounced ones. For 13 other fields, there’s been little change.

The key takeaway: the national effort to find stability in the face of a pandemic and a turbulent economy is much more than a one- or two-year disruption; it’s a quest that could take a lot longer to resolve.

Methodology

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey distributed to members via email every two weeks. Roughly 5,000 U.S.-based members respond to each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners and retirees are excluded from analysis so we can get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy. Data is weighted by engagement level, to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership & overall market population are not accounted for.

Alexandra Gunther and Adam Cohen from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article.