If you’d told someone a few decades ago you were a “social media manager” or a few decades before that, that you were a “machine learning engineer,” they probably would have looked at you like you’d dropped in from another planet (or like you’d invented a job because you couldn’t get a real one). But today, few people would blink at the mention of these roles.
The world changes over time, of course, and so do industries and jobs. Not only are there roles posted today that would’ve sounded like gibberish once upon a time, but some of them are in high demand and spreading at a fast clip.
With its 2020 Emerging Jobs Report, LinkedIn has identified the 15 fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. along with other workforce trends—such as the rise of several smaller cities with emerging job markets, the swell of tech in Washington, DC, and the increasing demand for remote and flexible work options (which, if you’re interested, you can find here!)
“By sharing insights about the types of roles being impacted most by rapid change, we want to make sure professionals and companies are able to prepare for the new world of work,” Guy Berger, LinkedIn’s principal economist, writes in the introduction to the report.
Here’s what you need to know:
The Top 15 Emerging Jobs
In order to identify the top emerging jobs, LinkedIn analyzed the public profiles of its members and calculated the rate of hiring growth for those occupations. Here’s the ranked list of roles (and links to search for job openings in those areas):
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Artificial Intelligence Specialist, 74% annual growth
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Robotics Engineer, 40% annual growth
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Data Scientist, 37% annual growth
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Full-Stack Engineer, 35% annual growth
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Site Reliability Engineer, 34% annual growth
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Customer Success Specialist, 34% annual growth
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Sales Development Representative, 34% annual growth
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Data Engineer, 33% annual growth
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Behavioral Health Technician, 32% annual growth
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Cybersecurity Specialist, 30% annual growth
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Back-End Developer, 30% annual growth
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Chief Revenue Officer, 28% annual growth
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Cloud Engineer, 27% annual growth
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JavaScript Developer, 25% annual growth
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Product Owner, 24% annual growth
The Top Emerging Secondary Cities
Living in—or looking to move to—a smaller city and searching for career opportunities? Here are five “secondary cities” with the top emerging job markets, according to LinkedIn (and links to search for open jobs there):