5 Ways to Beat the Wage Crisis Plaguing the Job Market

Five industries provide the most jobs with strong wage growth and annual salaries.
By Tara Sinclair ,

The financial crisis has long ended in the U.S. job market. We have seen big payroll gains and cut the jobless rate in half.

So why, then has a sense of crisis persisted among U.S. workers, with surveys showing many people feel the recession never ended, and the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders tapping into deep discontent on both sides of the political spectrum?

The answer, we have long suspected, is due to low wage-growth and an increasingly polarizing job market, with more high-skilled jobs proliferating, and not enough good jobs for the middle-or-lower skilled workers. In a study I released today with job site Indeed, where I am the chief economist, we put this theory to the test with startling results.

In order to see why workers are feeling dissatisfied, we looked to see which jobs in the U.S. economy have seen wage growth of higher than 25%, and an annual salary of $57,700, the purchasing power of the median household pre-crisis. What we found is that only 16% of workers have had those types of jobs in the past decade, a relatively small amount for an economy that has "recovered."

In short, though the financial crisis ended, the wage crisis has persisted in the U.S. Despite upticks in wage growth recently, we haven't seen any large movement.

What, then, is the way out? The good news is that there are jobs out there with plenty of opportunity and upside. In fact, when looking at Indeed's millions of job postings in the U.S., we find a whopping 35% meet our criteria for growth.

When digging in further, we see that these positions are dominated by five areas: technology, architecture and engineering, management, healthcare, and business and finance.

These are areas where we see high employer demand versus supply, little chance of automation, and dynamic fields that will expand, not shrink, as technology changes the workforce.

In short, to beat the wage crisis, more workers need to enter these fields. So far, it hasn't been happening. Not enough workers have been seeking these positions, employers haven't been training them, and policymakers haven't focused on connecting the dots.

The longer our wage crisis persists, however, the more people will be pushed into solving the problem. Recently, J.P. Morgan became the first major white collar employer to publicly raise wages, noting in part the need to retain and bring in talent. This a good sign that employers see the problem, and a signal to job seekers that if they have the right skills, good jobs are out there.

If we can get more U.S. workers into the five industries in our chart below, we believe discontent in the workforce will drop, and more importantly, people will have more money in their pockets to spend back into the economy.

Getting workers into the jobs of the future is not an easy task, but the answer, by many measures, is right in front of us. We just need to head the signals.

In These 5 Categories, the Majority of Job Postings Show High-Growth

Occupation categories ranked by high-growth job postings as a share of all postings

1

Computer and Mathematical

83.8%

2

Architecture and Engineering

81.5%

3

Management

76.0%

4

Healthcare Practitioners

76.0%

5

Business and Financial Operations

59.0%

This article is commentary by an independent contributor. 

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