Computer engineers. Computer support specialists. Database administrators. Systems analysts. Securities salesmen. The fastest-growing occupations of the future mostly will be high-technology positions or require a high degree of technology savvy, according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Labor.
More than one million high-tech jobs and counting have been created in the last eight years. The average high-tech job pays $53,000 a year, or 78 percent more than other kinds of jobs, according to the Department of Labor’s Futurework: Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century.
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The recent surge in high-tech employment has helped the overall service industry to account for 50 percent of the country’s employment growth from 1993 to 1999.
In Rhode Island, the most-in-demand occupations requiring a college degree include, in order of projected job growth: nurses, systems analysts, stockbrokers, business executives and computer engineers.
The outlook is similar in Massachusetts, where the list of fastest growing occupations is dominated by service industry jobs such as database administrator, system analyst and physical therapists.
Many Brown University students have been bypassing Wall Street to work at the myriad of technology start-ups that flourish in the San Francisco Bay area and other technology hot spots around the country, said Sheila Curran, Brown’s director of career services.
And it’s not just computer science majors that the dotcoms are hiring.
“Even liberal arts majors,” Curran said. “They are looking for good people with business savvy, the entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to live with a fair degree of ambiguity.”
But entry-level management jobs also are available for the asking in the retail sector, noted Peggy Ferguson, assistant director of career services at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston.
”There is a really high demand right now in any retail, whether it is assistant buyer or retail management,” Ferguson said. “There are just so many employers knocking on our door looking for students.”
“We’ve been bombarded by companies we’ve never heard from before, like Victoria’s Secret,” Ferguson added, referring to the mall-staple and catalog lingerie retailer.
But URI students are more interested in going to work for consulting companies, technology start-ups and financial firms.
“Those are the things that they would think of as sexy careers, the kind of stuff they want to write home about,” she said.
Area colleges also have found it easy to find jobs for graduates of their nursing and education programs.
The Rhode Island Department of Labor and Training projects the number of registered nursing positions in Rhode Island will grow by 2,273 from 1996 to 2006, ranking it as the second fastest growing job in the state after cashier.
According to the labor department’s projections for Rhode Island, more than 1,500 elementary and secondary school teaching positions are expected to be created from 1996 to 2006.
The fastest growing computer job here is systems analyst, for which the department expects an additional 1,800 jobs to be created in Rhode Island during the 10-year forecast period. Massachusetts labor officials expect the number of new systems analysts jobs generated there during the same period to top 17,000.
