Labor Market Insight

Career Trends

Understanding career trends can be an important tool in your career planning. Knowing which careers are the fastest growing, employ the most people, or, conversely, are professionally saturated and declining in numbers, can give you important information to determine your choice. This information can help you evaluate the options available to make a well-informed decision about which direction you want to take. Career trends overlap in certain ways with Labor Market Information (link to LMI blog) but are not the same in the information and statistics that they track.

For example, IT Security is a hot industry with incredible demand across the board. There is also a demonstrated shortage of skilled talent with experience. High demand with low supply – whether you’re just starting your journey or looking for a way to reinvent yourself, this trend might point you to a promising path. This is the case whether or not you are an IT professional. If IT security is hot, that means that IT Security firms offer promise overall, so someone who is in sales or marketing might find good and plentiful opportunities in this area. This is just one way that paying attention to trends helps you.

Career trends aren’t just which jobs are hot though, it includes other things too. Which skills are trending up or down? What are employers looking for? In what geographical area do opportunities exist? Answering these questions can help you know where to apply or how best to present yourself to potential employers. Knowing everything possible about the career you’re interested in will help you prioritize your skills and experience; lending the chance to highlight the right things on your resume and in interviews. Simultaneously, it can help you identify potential holes in your resume and portfolio, where you can work on how to gain the required skills or prepare to address their lack.

Understanding trends doesn’t mean that the only or even best decision revolves around joining the trend. It’s more like a deep well of knowledge that you can use to inform and support your choices. Tracking a trend can potentially give you bargaining power and access to opportunity. Take the Great Resignation, a trend that has been affecting the labor market recently. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/business/great-resignation-jobs.html
You may have no desire to quit your job and make dramatic changes.

You may continue to enjoy working at your company and feel no need to follow this trend to quit your job; however, you can benefit from understanding how that trend affects you, in order to be able to identify the possible connections to the bigger picture. Taking the Great Resignation as an example, it likely means your company is more focused on retaining people now more than ever. It could be a good time to negotiate salary, a promotion, or request for additional responsibilities and opportunities because you have identified how to make the best of your data. Paying attention to current career trends can make a difference. Knowing what’s going on broadly and what is going on in the workplace currently can help steer you to a more fulfilling and successful career. It is always important to turn to all available resources; you never know when or how you come across prospective careers out there waiting for you to discover them.


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