The jobs America needs most over the next decade

The fastest-growing jobs in America cluster around three forces reshaping the economy at once: an aging population, a renewable energy build-out, and a business world running on data. Someone has to collect, protect, and interpret all of it. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks projected employment change for hundreds of occupations, measuring expected percentage growth over a 10-year window rather than raw job counts. That distinction matters. A small occupation can post large percentage growth while adding relatively few total positions. That is why several of the country's fastest-expanding roles are not household names.

Healthcare dominates the list for two reasons. The U.S. population over 65 keeps growing, which pushes up demand for chronic disease management, rehabilitation, and preventive care. States have also widened what nurse practitioners and physician assistants may do without direct physician oversight. Both roles have become the backbone of primary care in many rural and underserved areas. Clean energy occupations such as wind turbine service technicians and solar photovoltaic installers are climbing because the physical infrastructure of the energy transition is still being assembled, county by county.

The quantitative occupations here — data scientists, statisticians, information security analysts, and operations research analysts — expand for a related reason. Companies in finance, logistics, insurance, retail, and healthcare generate far more data than their existing staff can model, secure, or act on. This list draws on BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook projections, the standard reference for U.S. occupational forecasting. It favors occupations flagged as fastest-growing by percentage over raw-number leaders such as registered nurses or software developers. Those larger fields add far more total jobs but grow more slowly in percentage terms.

For students choosing a degree path, workers weighing a mid-career switch, or anyone mapping where hiring is headed, these 10 occupations show what the labor market is bidding up. Each entry below covers the training required, the employers hiring, and the forces driving demand.

Illustration: Quartz

Wind turbine service technicians, often called windtechs, sit at or near the top of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ranking of fastest-growing occupations by percentage. No bachelor's degree is required, making this one of the shortest routes into the energy industry for workers without a four-year credential.

Windtechs inspect, maintain, troubleshoot, and repair the mechanical, hydraulic, and electrical systems inside a turbine's nacelle. That housing sits at the top of the tower and contains the gearbox, generator, and control electronics. Reaching it means climbing a ladder inside the tower tube, often several hundred feet up, while carrying tools and wearing fall-arrest gear. Larger turbines may have a service lift, though climbing remains part of the work. Safety instruction in working at height, rescue, and first aid is standard before a technician works on a live site.

Training usually comes through a certificate or associate degree program at a technical school or community college, lasting anywhere from several months to two years. Such programs cluster in wind-heavy states including Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Most combine classroom instruction in electrical theory and hydraulics with practice on ground-level training towers. Employers then add equipment-specific instruction after hiring, since turbine designs differ substantially between manufacturers.

Demand comes from two directions. New utility-scale projects across the Great Plains and the first offshore wind farms along the East Coast need crews to commission equipment. Turbines installed during the buildout of the 2000s and 2010s have also aged into major component work. Gearbox overhauls, blade repairs, and generator replacements cannot be put off for long without losing generation revenue.

The job is physical and weather-exposed, because turbines are serviced in the field year-round. Technicians typically work in small crews and travel among sites across a regional territory rather than reporting to a single location. Pay is solidly middle class. Low entry barriers paired with steady demand have pushed workforce boards in wind states to build dedicated training pipelines for the role.

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Nurse practitioners are expanding faster than almost any other healthcare occupation, largely because of a legal shift. Roughly half of U.S. states now grant them full practice authority, allowing them to diagnose conditions, order tests, and prescribe medication without physician oversight. In counties that cannot recruit a primary care physician, the role now functions as a direct substitute.

The credential sits on top of registered nursing. A candidate needs an active RN license and clinical experience at the bedside. After that comes a master's or doctoral degree in nursing, paired with a population-focused certification — family practice, pediatrics, adult-gerontology, psychiatric-mental health, women's health, or acute care. Most programs run two to four years beyond the initial nursing degree, depending on the track and whether the student stays enrolled full time.

Psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioners have drawn particular demand. Large stretches of rural America have no practicing psychiatrist. PMHNPs can evaluate patients, manage medication, and provide therapy in places where no other prescriber handles mental health care.

Retail clinics inside pharmacy and grocery chains lean heavily on nurse practitioners to handle vaccinations, strep tests, minor infections, and routine screenings without a physician on site. Community health centers and critical access hospitals use them the same way, often as the primary clinician a patient sees across multiple visits.

The economics explain much of the applicant pipeline. The job pays well above a staff RN position. It also requires far less total training than the four years of medical school and three to seven years of residency a physician completes. For a nurse already working, it is one of the shortest routes to a substantial raise and prescriptive authority.

In full-practice states, some nurse practitioners skip employment altogether and open their own clinics, billing insurers directly. That has changed how primary care reaches small towns, where a solo NP practice is often the closest option between a patient's home and a distant regional hospital.

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Solar photovoltaic installers rank among the fastest-expanding occupations in the U.S. by percentage growth, and most enter the trade without a four-year degree. These crews mount panel arrays and wire them into a building's electrical system. Training usually comes through on-the-job instruction, a short certificate program, or an apprenticeship under a licensed electrical contractor.

The daily work involves assessing a roof or ground site, assembling racking and mounting hardware, setting panels, running conduit and DC wiring, and connecting the array to an inverter and the service panel. Installers also coordinate permitting inspections and utility interconnection checks, which vary by jurisdiction. Licensing rules differ by state, and many installers eventually pursue electrician credentials so they can handle the higher-value electrical portions of a job themselves.

Demand follows policy and price. State incentive programs, net metering rules that set what a household earns for power it exports back to the grid, and the long decline in photovoltaic module costs have together put rooftop solar within reach of far more homeowners than a decade ago. California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona concentrate much of the hiring, a function of sun exposure, population growth, and regulatory environments that make the economics of installation work.

A typical residential installation runs one to three days, depending on system size and roof complexity. Commercial and utility-scale projects operate on a different scale, with larger crews and timelines stretching into weeks or months. The work is outdoors, performed at height in most residential cases, and seasonal in colder regions where winter roof work slows.

Battery storage has become part of the same job description. More homeowners now pair panels with a home battery, so installers need familiarity with storage hardware, charge controllers, and backup wiring alongside standard PV work.

Because the training runway is short, solar installation has become a focus of workforce retraining programs, including efforts aimed at workers leaving coal and oil-and-gas regions for jobs that draw on overlapping mechanical and electrical skills.

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Data scientists rank among the fastest-expanding occupations in the U.S. because companies across retail, insurance, logistics, and agriculture now collect far more data than their existing staff can model or interpret. The role pairs statistics and programming with industry knowledge, turning raw datasets into forecasts, pricing decisions, and product changes a business can act on.

Most positions require at least a bachelor's degree in a quantitative field such as statistics, computer science, mathematics, or economics. A master's degree has become common at larger employers. Hiring managers want candidates who understand machine learning methods and the commercial problem those methods are meant to solve. Fluency in Python or R, SQL, and cloud data platforms is standard.

Generative artificial intelligence has pulled the job in a new direction. Building, evaluating, and fine-tuning large language models draws on the statistical and engineering foundation data scientists already hold. Many have moved part of their work toward model testing, output evaluation, and deployment pipelines rather than classical regression and clustering alone.

Breadth of employer is one reason the occupation keeps growing. Banks use data scientists for fraud detection and credit risk, hospital systems for readmission prediction, freight companies for route and demand forecasting, and e-commerce firms for recommendation engines. That spread insulates the role from any single sector's downturn and keeps pay elevated relative to other fast-growing fields.

Hiring conditions differ sharply by experience level. Entry-level competition has intensified as more universities launched dedicated data science degrees and as bootcamps multiplied over the past decade, crowding the junior end of the market. Candidates with three to five years of experience shipping models into production — and maintaining them once real users depend on them — remain hard to recruit.

The job title varies more than most. The same work may be posted as machine learning engineer, applied scientist, decision scientist, or analytics engineer. That matters for anyone scanning listings rather than searching a single keyword.

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Information security analysts defend an organization's networks, systems, and data against intrusion, and the role is expanding because the volume and cost of cyberattacks keep climbing. They monitor traffic for suspicious activity, investigate incidents after a breach, run penetration tests to find weaknesses before attackers do, and design the safeguards meant to stop the next attempt.

Most positions call for a bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field. Employers also place real weight on industry certifications, with CISSP and CompTIA Security+ among the most commonly requested. Many analysts arrive by way of network or systems administration, since defending infrastructure comes easier to someone who has already built and maintained it.

Regulation is one engine behind the growth. Healthcare organizations handling patient records, banks processing transactions, and contractors working with federal agencies all face compliance regimes that require dedicated security staffing, documented controls, and recurring audits. Those requirements generate hiring driven by legal obligation rather than discretionary spending.

The second engine is attack volume. Ransomware and phishing campaigns now hit school districts, municipal governments, hospital groups, and small manufacturers, not only large corporations. Organizations that once treated security as a part-time duty for a general IT staffer have moved toward hiring specialists.

Remote and hybrid work widened the surface area analysts must defend. Employees connect to corporate systems from home networks, personal laptops, and mobile devices, which multiplies the endpoints a security team has to monitor and authenticate. Companies that once leaned on outside consultants have brought the function in-house.

Cloud migration has reshaped the skill set. As firms move workloads to Amazon $AMZN Web Services, Microsoft $MSFT Azure, or Google $GOOGL Cloud, analysts who understand identity management and cloud configuration are harder to hire than generalists. Compared with the healthcare roles on this list, demand here tracks corporate technology budgets more closely, though compliance rules put a floor under it.

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Physician assistants handle most of what a primary care visit requires: examining patients, ordering and interpreting tests, diagnosing conditions, prescribing medication, and assisting in surgery. The training runs about two to three years of graduate school rather than medical school plus residency.

Entry requires a master's degree from an accredited physician assistant program, followed by the Physician Assistant National Certifying Exam, administered by the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants. Admission is competitive. Most programs expect applicants to log direct patient care hours first, commonly as an EMT or paramedic, a medical scribe, a certified nursing assistant, or a phlebotomist.

The curriculum follows a generalist medical model. Classroom coursework comes first, then clinical rotations through family medicine, internal medicine, surgery, emergency medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, and obstetrics and gynecology. That breadth defines the profession. A PA can practice in dermatology for five years, move into orthopedic surgery, and later shift to urgent care without earning another degree, because the credential is not tied to one specialty.

Supervision rules differ sharply by state. Some require a written collaborative agreement naming a specific physician. Others have loosened those requirements, and the American Academy of Physician Associates has lobbied state legislatures to let individual practices, rather than statute, define the relationship. The group voted in 2021 to adopt physician associate as the profession's official title, though physician assistant remains the legal term in most state licensing codes.

Hospital systems in rural counties and underserved city neighborhoods rely on PAs where physician recruitment has stalled, often staffing clinics with one or two physicians overseeing a larger clinical team. Surgical practices employ PAs to run pre-operative workups, assist in the operating room, and manage post-surgical follow-up, which frees surgeon time for procedures. Pay is strong relative to the length of training, which draws career changers out of paramedicine, respiratory therapy, and nursing. Broad clinical authority, portability across specialties, and a short training runway keep applicant volume high.

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Medical and health services managers run the business side of healthcare, directing budgets, staffing, compliance, and daily operations for hospital departments, nursing homes, group practices, and outpatient centers. Demand keeps climbing because healthcare organizations are harder to operate than they used to be. Regulatory requirements have layered up, technology systems cost more, and administrators face steady pressure to hold down costs without weakening patient outcomes.

Most positions require a bachelor's degree. A large share of employers now prefer or require a master's in health administration, business administration, or public health. Many managers arrive from the clinical side rather than straight from business school. A nurse might take on charge nurse duties, then unit management, then department leadership. That clinical background helps when the job involves decisions about staffing ratios or care protocols.

Growth here tracks the expansion of the healthcare sector itself. Every new urgent care location, ambulatory surgery center, dialysis clinic, or hospital service line needs someone to run it. Consolidation has added another layer. As independent practices get absorbed into large hospital systems and private equity-backed physician groups, the administrative tier managing those networks expands with them.

The day-to-day work varies sharply by setting. A practice manager at a small orthopedic office handles scheduling, billing vendors, and payroll personally. A hospital department administrator manages dozens of staff, negotiates with insurers, and answers to accreditation surveyors. Both fall under the same occupational category, which is part of why that category is so large.

Health information systems have become a bigger share of the role. Electronic health records, revenue cycle software, and patient privacy obligations under HIPAA all land on administrators, and some managers specialize in health informatics for that reason.

The work is office-based and less physically taxing than bedside care. That makes it a common destination for clinicians who want to stay in healthcare without the demands of direct patient contact.

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Physical therapist assistants help patients recovering from injury, surgery, or illness regain movement and manage pain, working under a licensed physical therapist's supervision. The occupation is expanding as the U.S. population ages and more older adults undergo joint replacements that require rehabilitation afterward.

Entry requires an associate degree from a program accredited by the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education, usually two years of coursework paired with clinical rotations. Graduates then sit for the National Physical Therapy Examination for PTAs. States regulate the role individually, so supervision rules and continuing education requirements differ depending on where someone practices.

The work is hands-on throughout the day. PTAs guide patients through therapeutic exercise, assist with gait training and balance work, and apply modalities such as heat, cold, and ultrasound. They also document how a patient is progressing against the plan of care. What they cannot do is perform the initial evaluation or write that plan themselves — that boundary is what legally separates the assistant from the therapist.

Employment settings span outpatient orthopedic clinics, hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, school systems, and home health agencies. Home health and skilled nursing work has grown as rehabilitation shifts away from hospitals and inpatient stays get shorter, which means more recovery happens in a patient's own residence or a long-term care facility.

The job is physically demanding. PTAs are on their feet for most of a shift, kneel and crouch repeatedly, and frequently support or transfer patients who cannot safely bear their own weight.

The relatively short training path has made the role a common entry point for career changers. Personal trainers, athletic trainers, and massage therapists already understand anatomy and movement but hold no licensed clinical credential, and two years of schooling closes that gap. Some PTAs later pursue a doctor of physical therapy degree to become therapists themselves, though that means enrolling in a separate graduate program rather than converting an existing license. Prior clinical hours can strengthen an application, but they do not shorten the degree itself.

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Statisticians build the methods that turn messy real-world questions into measurable ones — designing surveys, clinical trials, and sampling plans, then analyzing what comes back. The occupation ranks among the fastest-growing in the U.S. because industries that once decided by instinct now want defensible numbers behind the call.

Most positions require a master's degree in statistics, biostatistics, or a closely related quantitative discipline. Some entry-level government and industry jobs accept a bachelor's degree paired with solid command of R, SAS, Python, or SQL. Coursework centers on probability theory, regression, experimental design, and survey sampling rather than software engineering.

Biostatistics is a major specialization within the field. Biostatisticians set sample sizes, randomization schemes, and trial endpoints for clinical studies. Their analyses form the statistical backbone of the evidence drug sponsors submit to the Food and Drug Administration. Pharmaceutical firms, contract research organizations, academic medical centers, and the National Institutes of Health all hire in this area.

The federal government is the other anchor employer. Statisticians at the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Center for Health Statistics maintain the sampling frames and weighting procedures behind federal data. Their work underpins the unemployment rate, the consumer price index, and national health surveys. Errors there ripple into monetary policy, congressional apportionment, and how federal money gets distributed.

Insurance carriers employ statisticians alongside actuaries to model claim frequency, catastrophe exposure, and mortality assumptions. Agricultural companies use them to evaluate seed trials across varied soil and weather conditions. Market research firms rely on them to correct for nonresponse bias in polling.

What separates the role from adjacent quantitative careers is emphasis. Statisticians are trained to ask how a dataset was generated in the first place. Does the sample represent the population? Was confounding controlled? Could an observed effect plausibly be noise? That attention to inference and uncertainty, rather than raw predictive accuracy, is why regulated industries keep the title distinct even as the software toolkits converge.