Job Trends: Fastest-Growing, High-Paying Jobs in 2018

The fastest-growing roles also happen to be some of the highest-paying in 2018, and one sector dominates the map. Here is the way the wind is blowing if you’re considering a career change or coaching your college-bound kids on a future career.

While I have no intention of working a traditional job in the near future, I do like to keep tabs on how the job market is changing. I came across this awesome chart on HowMuch, which pulls info from listings on one of the major job boards to figure out what roles are growing the most.

A few things:

• The fastest-growing roles also happen to be some of the highest-paying. You are essentially looking at the overlap of purple and the larger size people icons to see that this is true. It pays to be in a hot sector – not just for job prospects, but for commanding the highest salary.
• Tech sector roles dominate this infographic. And within tech, data insight and engineering roles are where it’s at.

I have said multiple times that the two fields I would advise a new college grad to go into if they were strictly optimizing for financial metrics are engineering and sales. In these two roles, the salary information above understates total compensation significantly. Most software engineers I know receive a bonus of at least 20% of their base salary. At places like Google, the bonus and stock grants can equal 50% to 100% of base salary as you reach the mid and senior levels. The difference in sales is even more stark.

I shied away from an engineering degree when I was in college because I thought I wouldn’t want to code all day. What I discovered after graduating though was that an engineering undergrad degree opened the door to a ton of roles in the tech sector that were not about coding day to day and yet required or preferred a degree in engineering to make the hire.

An example of this is engineering management. Almost all engineering managers have an engineering degree. At the top companies in Silicon Valley, they essentially require it. And yet you can enter the field immediately in management without being an engineer. New grads can become associate product managers at Google or Facebook, for example.

A good salesperson makes the majority of their money on commission. A successful multi-time CEO once told me that if a company is healthy, the top salesperson should be making more than anyone in the company, including him.

Do these roles match up with your view on the hottest, high-paying jobs? Any others you see a lot of promise in?