While eight out of the top ten jobs in 2000 were still there in 2019, at least two pretty interesting things did happen.

Fast Food and Counter Workers jumped significantly in rank, but more importantly, the rate of employment per 1,000 people skyrocketed from 17.8 up to 27.6. That is a huge leap and would make you guess that Americans eat out a lot more now than we used to.

An even bigger story: Home Health and Personal Care Aides didn’t even crack the top 100 jobs back in 2000 and now is number 4 on the list. And this role, previously employing just 2.5 out of every 1,000 employees nationally, now accounts for a whopping 21.8 per 1,000—nearly a 9X growth in the rate of employment—by far the largest jump of any role in the data. As Boomers age, there is a huge need for caretakers for them, so this seems like a job that will continue to grow for at least another decade or two!

What other jobs are changing in terms of share of employment? Well, it depends on how you look at it.

The largest increases in employment rate change, by far, were among Home Health and Personal Care Aides; and Fast Food and Counter Workers, as mentioned previously.

And you can see 3 more of our top ten jobs are also growing significantly.

When looking at the highest rate drops, some interesting insights appear. For instance, CEOs (and their executive assistants) and General and Operations Managers are suffering significant job shrinkage…maybe due to all the M&A activity over the past 20 years? Maybe something else entirely.

And it's no surprise that Data Entry Keyers and Packers and Packagers, Hand have both gone down as technology, automation, and AI have taken away so much of their work, one assumes.

Here the horizontal axis is still showing the employment rate change per 1,000 people. But if you examine that rate change as a multiple of the original, as on the vertical axis, even more insights are visible. Dot size now indicates the total number of employees, which is also revealing.

In the group with the highest positive rate of change multiple, several are in personal care cateogry – roles like Massage Therapists; Manicurists and Pedicurists; and Skincare Specialists; as well as our huge outlier on both axes, Home Health and Personal Care Aides.

And a couple of jobs related to the booming oil industry in the U.S.

And some others that may reflect some cultural shifts, such as the massive increase in the number of Coaches and Scouts; and Meeting, Convention, and Event Planners. (Keep an eye on that last group post-virus—in-person events are a huge question mark going forward.)

You can't talk about jobs without talking about wages...

As you can easily see, Management Occupations have done relatively well overall. Wages have mostly increased in excess of the 50% inflation benchmark. And four of the top five and seven of the top ten, in terms of wage increases, belong in this category.

Other jobs that have landed in the top ten in wage increases are Chefs and Head Cooks, Agricultural Equipment Operators, and Executive Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (there may be fewer of them, but their pay is increasing.)

Interestingly, Computer and Mathematical Occupations, which you might expect to be a good employment category, contains a lot of jobs that have fallen short, and well short in some cases, of the 50% total inflation benchmark. Can you say "skill commoditization" and "offshoring"?

Let's look back at those top ten jobs and see how they've fared, in terms of wages. Not great, not terrible.

Of course, everything has changed...

Jobs in the Time of COVID-19

Apologies to Gabriel García Márquez, but there is no better way to say it. This entire dataset is not exactly obsolete, but boy is it going to change. The pandemic eliminated almost 17M jobs in three weeks here in the United States. Look back at the top 10 jobs by number of employees. Retail is mostly closed, restaurants are running on skeleton crews for takeout only, so think about the impact on all of these jobs, which occupies around 10% of the American workforce.

Hopefully when the economy does open up, things can return to some semblance of normal. For now, we'll have to wait to see how it all plays out, but you can bet the changes in the job market will be noticeable if the pandemic continues for as long as predictions say it might.