Fastest-Growing Jobs: Cities Where They Cluster > #6 Phoenix It's Community & Social Service

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The Best Employment Markets for the Fastest-Growing Jobs

ABODO reports the top-ten cities for the top-five occupations, as ranked by employment density.

By Mary Salmonsen 

Nationally, the current unemployment rate is at less than 5%, down from a high of 10% in 2009. The job market was and still is in a period of steady growth, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with a national average job growth rate of 4.47% across 22 job field categories between 2012 and 2015.

The top five fastest-growing job categories far surpass the average.
1. Community and social service sector grew by 14.61% between 2012 and 2015
2. Computer and mathematics sector grew by 14.49%.
3. Health care practitioners and technicians grew by 9.89%,
4. Construction and extraction by 9.24%, and
5. Art, design, entertainment, sports, and media by 8.42%.

But “not all cities are created equally,” as ABODO states in its new “Best Cities for Job-Seekers” report. Different occupations and industries are clustered in different cities across the country, and depending on a job-seeker’s chosen field, moving to one of these occupation centers may be the best move for their career.
. . . For most of the nation’s fast-growing occupations, metropolitan areas were among the best locations for job seekers. The exception was farming, fishing, and forestry, which grew by 7.95% between 2012 and 2015, but did not rise above the national average in any of the cities surveyed.
Although ABODO’s density calculations highlight the robust industries already in place in the nation’s largest cities, they also make note of smaller cities and their occupational communities. Depending on what a job-seeker prefers in a potential home, they might do better in job-hunting and in quality if they choose a rapidly-expanding market over a long-expanded larger city.
A chart of density ratios across the five fields in all 25 surveyed cities can be found in the full ABODO report.