Your Next Decade of Hiring Already Has a Map & Most Employers Aren’t Reading It
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Nurse practitioners are the fastest growing job in America, and it isn’t close. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its updated occupational projections yesterday, covering 2025 through 2035, and NPs top the list with 41% projected growth and a 2025 median pay of $132,300 a year. Solar photovoltaic installers come in second at 37% growth and $53,140 in pay. Data scientists round out the top three at 35% and $120,230.
I’d read this list as a rate table, not a headcount table, and that distinction matters more than anything else on the page. A small occupation can post a huge percentage gain without ever showing up as a meaningful number of actual jobs added. Solar installers growing 37% and home health and personal care aides growing 18% are not the same story once you translate percentage into people. The aide number, low as it looks next to solar, is the one that will move the overall employment count, because the base is so much larger to begin with.
Healthcare dominates this list in a way that should shape how any employer thinks about the next decade. Counting clinical roles, health management, and health teaching together, 12 of the 20 fastest growing occupations sit in healthcare. Medical and health services managers grow 24% and earn a median pay of $123,860. Physician assistants grow 21% at $135,880. Physical therapist assistants grow 23% at $68,380, occupational therapy assistants 21% at $72,300, and psychiatric technicians 22% at $45,130. Home health and personal care aides land at 18% growth and $35,800, the lowest median pay on the entire list and, by sheer volume, probably the occupation adding the most actual bodies to payrolls nationwide.
Technology holds three spots, and every one of them pays well: data scientists at 35% and $120,230, computer and information research scientists at 22% and $140,300 (the highest median pay of any occupation on the list), and information security analysts at 21% and $129,180. I want to sit with that for a second, because it cuts against a narrative that’s gotten louder all year. BLS built these projections with full knowledge of where AI adoption stands today, and the government’s own ten-year forecast still puts three technical occupations in the top 20. What’s likely happening is a split we’ve been watching play out in real time, one I wrote about in our look at Bill Gates’s entry-level warning the other day. Senior technical talent that can build, secure, and interpret AI systems looks more valuable by the year. Entry-level technical work is where the actual disruption is landing.
Energy adds two occupations to the list. Solar photovoltaic installers grow 37% at $53,140, and wind turbine service technicians grow 30% at $64,120. Safety and skilled trades close it out: occupational health and safety technicians at 19% and $61,560, occupational health and safety specialists at 18% and $90,150, and industrial machinery mechanics at 18% and $64,520.
For any employer trying to plan hiring around this data instead of just admiring it, I’d point to the names in the middle of the list before the ones at the top. Physical therapist assistant at $68,380, occupational therapy assistant at $72,300, and industrial machinery mechanic at $64,520 all combine real growth with real pay and none of them demand the six-year runway a nurse practitioner or physician assistant does. If you’re building a workforce plan around where the competition for talent is headed, those are the roles worth watching before your competitors start watching them too. We work these exact placements every week through our staffing services, and the demand in physical therapy support and skilled trades has been building for longer than this report suggests.
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The Real Jobless Rate Just Hit 24.9% & It’s Been Climbing for Four Months Straight
While BLS was mapping out where hiring goes over the next ten years, another release tells you something about the workers filling today’s openings. The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity put out its True Rate of Unemployment for July, and it came in at 24.9%, up 0.2 points from June and rising for the fourth straight month. The official government unemployment rate for the same month sat at 4.1%.
A gap that wide, 4.1% against 24.9%, is the whole reason LISEP built this measure in the first place. TRU counts someone as functionally unemployed if they have no job, if they want full-time work of 35 hours or more and can’t get it, or if they work full time and still make less than $26,000 a year before taxes in 2025 dollars. Apply that definition, and roughly one in four American workers falls short of it.
TRU has climbed 1.3 points since March and is closing back in on its December 2025 peak of 25.2%. LISEP also tracks a broader measure called TRU Out of Population, which folds in people who’ve left the labor force altogether, and that figure reached 53.8% in July, up 0.8 points since the start of the year.
Gene Ludwig, the institute’s chairman, put it plainly in the release: “If this continues, it would suggest the labor market is losing strength despite what we may see in the headline unemployment numbers.” He also flagged the participation angle directly, noting that a strong labor market should be pulling more people into the workforce, not fewer.
The demographic splits moved in different directions, and I’d watch the gender numbers most closely. Women hit 31.0% in July, up 1.6 points from 29.4% in June, the highest that figure has reached since March 2021. Men fell to 19.5% from 20.4%. The gap between them widened to 11.5 points from 9. Race and ethnicity moved less uniformly: Black workers held flat at 27.3%, Hispanic workers improved to 26.7% from 28.2%, and white workers moved the other way, up to 23.8% from 23.2%. A single month of demographic movement in a series this granular deserves a second look before anyone builds a theory on it, especially with Hispanic workers moving 1.5 points in the opposite direction from women in the same release.
Education tells the steadiest story in the data. Workers with no high school diploma sit at 50.3%, and a high school diploma alone brings that down to 28.5%. The number that should stop any hiring manager mid-scroll is the next one: some college brings the rate back up to 29.5%, worse than stopping at the diploma. A bachelor’s degree drops the rate to 16.8%, and an advanced degree to 12.8%. A partial credential paired with full student debt is the worst square on this whole board, and it has been the worst square for years.
I keep coming back to what this measure is built on. LISEP put a $26,000 wage floor directly into the definition, so TRU functions as much as a pay-adequacy number as an employment number. Someone working 40 hours a week at $12.50 an hour reads as unemployed in this measure and reads as employed in the official BLS count. Both numbers are true. They’re just answering different questions, and I wrote about that same disconnect between headline confidence and worker bargaining power after last month’s job seeker confidence data came in soft even as job postings held up.
For employers, the practical read is simple. A functional unemployment rate approaching 25% means the applicant pool right now is full of people who are technically employed on paper and actively looking for something that pays enough to live on. Those candidates return calls. They also walk for two dollars an hour, because two dollars an hour is frequently the entire distance between the two sides of LISEP’s line.
