The Emerging Professional, Scientific, and Technical Sector

Although the professional, scientific, and technical industry sector makes up only 6% of the U.S. workforce, it was responsible for 10% of national job growth from 2010 to 2012. In addition, the broad industry (NAICS 54) grew by 6% in the past two years, which illustrates our nation’s march toward a more technical, STEM type workforce. There are over 9.2 million jobs in this industry, which is driven by sub-sectors like computer system design services and management, scientific, and technical consulting services.

The Industries

In this post we’d like to give you a better picture of the top sub-sectors that are driving the professional, scientific, and technical sector. To do this, we’ve selected 16 six-digit industries that fall into this sector. Each one is either:

We have included the 2010 and 2012 job totals, change, % change, and top occupations that staff each industry. Many of these sectors can be thought of as “specialists” that generate their income by providing consulting or professional services to their consumers. NOTE: We have not included every sub-sector of NAICS 54 on this list.

Observations:

These are the big “E’s” on the eye chart, but other sub-sectors are also worth noting. Research and development (research and development in the physical, engineering and life sciences and research and development in biotechnology) as well as testing laboratories are showing good growth. Together they have added 45,000 new jobs since 2010. They all employ medical scientists, biological and chemical techs, and chemists.

Industries related to business operations also appear to be thriving:

Geography

Before we take a closer look at the actual occupations, let’s consider how these jobs are distributed. Using Analyst, we filtered for which states have the highest concentration of the 16 sub-sectors. Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia have by far the highest concentration of these industries. These three geographies are also the only areas that we would call “highly specialized” for these jobs, which means that the concentration of professional, scientific, and technical jobs is more than 60% greater than the national average, and is actually getting closer to twice what a typical region has. After that, we see that Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, New Mexico, and California have concentrations between 1.2 and 1.59, which means the jobs are 20-60% more concentrated in these states (the national average equals 1.0).

The other states’ concentrations are closer to or (in most cases) below the national average. Why are most states below the national average? Good question. This is because the states with higher concentrations have such a huge number of these jobs: they throw off the average. This is a great illustration of “clustering.”

Now, if your state doesn’t have a high concentration of these jobs at the moment, fear not. Quite a few states out there have shown some pretty impressive growth for these industries over the past two years. In particular, North Dakota (17% since 2010), Delaware (13%), Georgia (12%), Utah (11%), Vermont (11%), New York (11%), Washington (11%), and South Carolina (10%). A lot of states have shown moderate growth and just a handful have actually declined.

Finally, here are the large MSAs with the highest concentrations (1.2 and up). The San Jose and Washington, D.C. MSAs have concentrations more than twice as high as the national average. See the table for more detail:

The Occupations

So what jobs are we talking about? We’ve mentioned a few already, but you’ll see a list of the top occupations for the 16 aforementioned sub-sectors below. These are jobs that we could consider “emerging” as these sectors continue to thrive. Note: The growth of these occupations isn’t quite as high as we’ve seen for some of the sub-sectors. This is mostly because the occupations are staffed across other industries that aren’t growing quite as much (or not at all).

For this table, we’re including the occupations from our previous table, their total employment (across all industries — not just the ones above), their 2010-2012 growth, average hourly wage, and typical education level:

Observations:

Here are a few helpful definitions if you’d like to explore some of these jobs further:

Conclusions

So, quick summary:

Data and analysis from this report came from Analyst, EMSI’s web-based labor market tool. Please contact Rob Sentz (rob@economicmodeling.com) if you have questions or comments. Follow us @desktopecon.

Lab technician photo by Bigstock.