Thinking about changing jobs in the New Year? With unemployment at a post-recession low of 5%, job hunters’ prospects are brighter than they’ve been in a long time.
Some skills are so scarce that candidates can expect to have their pick of offers, according to a study from CareerBuilders and its data-analytics arm, EMSI. The research compared job postings with the number of hires in each of the past 12 months and pinpointed the biggest, and most persistent, gaps.
No. 1 on the list: Nursing, with almost 200,000 unfilled openings. Software and app developers came in a distant second. Around 84,000 of those open posts go unfilled in any given month.
Here’s CareerBuilder’s ranking of the 10 fields where demand is greatest, with median hourly pay for each:
- Registered nurses $32.04
- Software/app developers $45.92
- Marketing managers $61.12
- Sales managers $53.20
- Health services managers $44.62
- Network administrators $36.44
- Industrial engineers $39.18
- Computer systems analysts $39.76
- Web developers $30.52
- Financial managers $55.44
Not all the hottest jobs in 2016 will call for a four-year degree. Among those that don’t, by far the biggest unmet demand is for drivers of heavy and tractor-trailer trucks, a separate CareerBuilder list shows. Over the past 12 months, employers have been unable to fill almost a million (984,669) truck driving jobs, suggesting that the current median hourly wage of $19.00 might soon be headed higher.