Job forecasts point to importance of higher education

• Health care: This sector is expected to be the leading job generator, adding 4 million by 2018, according to Labor Department data. An aging population requires more doctors and nurses, physical therapists, home health aides, and pharmacists.

Many of these jobs will pay well. Physical therapists averaged about $76,000 last year, according to the department’s data. Others pay far less. Home health care aides earned an average of just $21,600.

Home health care and personal care aides are expected to add about 900,000 jobs by 2018—50 percent more than in 2008.

Jennifer Gamboa of Body Dynamics Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based physical therapy firm, says the drive to reduce health care costs should benefit her profession, which can treat pain less expensively than surgery. Gamboa plans to add two employees in the next year.

• Information technology: Technology could be an economic elixir as computers and online networks expand ways to automate services, distribute media, and communicate.

Companies will need people to build and secure those networks. That should boost the number of programmers, network administrators, and security specialists by 45 percent to 2.1 million by 2018, the government forecasts. Most of these jobs will provide above-average pay.

Technology pay averaged $84,400 in 2008—nearly double the average private-sector pay of $45,400, according to an analysis of the most recent full-year data by the TechAmerica Foundation, a research group.

• New industries: Deepak Advani, an IBM executive, has a title he says didn’t exist five years ago: “Vice president of predictive analytics.”

Companies and government agencies have amassed data on behavior ranging from shopping habits to criminal activity. Predictive analytics is the art of determining what to do with that data. How should workers’ time be deployed? How best to target customers? Such jobs could grow 20 percent by 2018, the government predicts.

Still, economists say more will be needed to boost job growth. The answer might be some technological breakthrough akin to the personal computer or the internet.

“Most big booms come from a particular sector that moves the rest of the economy,” said Richard Freeman, a Harvard labor economist.

Technology spurred job growth after the 1982 and 1991 recessions. The PC became revolutionary in the early 1980s. Internet use exploded after the Mosaic web browser was introduced in 1994. Housing eventually lifted employment after the 2001 dot-com bust.

“There’s a lack of clarity on what the next big thing is going to be this time,” said David Card, an economics professor at the University of California.

Until there is, many people will have to lower expectations and living standards as they enter fields with less pay and less job stability, said Dan Finnigan, CEO of online employment service Jobvite.

“People who are unemployed have to embrace this future that they are going to have many jobs,” he said. “We will always be working on the next gig.”

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