(Continued from previous post.)

You’re working hard in your current job and, at the same time, trying to plan your future. Maybe you’re thinking about a potential career change. Or maybe you have “layoff aversion” and would be comforted by having a sense of what the future might bring in your current occupation.

As I noted in the last post, regardless of where you are in your career or what experience and skills you have, there are market forces at work in the job arena that are beyond your control. And whether or not you’ve experienced a layoff yourself, we all know it’s not the most pleasant of experiences.

Your best insurance against the effects of market forces and/or a layoff is to be proactive in designing your future, rather than just waiting for it to show up.

In the last post, I listed some questions that you can start asking yourself now while there’s still time to create a vision and a plan for your future. But to help you answer these questions, it can be useful to have some grounded information about occupational trends.

That’s what I’m going to talk about today: some resources for gathering factual, grounded occupational trend information. These resources are a great starting place for creating a long-term prognosis for your career or occupation. So let’s jump right in . . .

There’s one resource that you absolutely MUST check out when you’re starting your occupation market research: America’s Job Bank (link).

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, this website is a collection of electronic tools managed as a federal-state partnership, and operated through grants to the states of New York and Minnesota, in partnership with the other states and private sector organizations.

This website contains a dizzying collection of web-based resources that you’ll want to explore on your own. Some examples are as follows:

• Midlife career change help

• Job skills list

• Top jobs in US

• Top jobs of the future

• Government grants for career changes

• Occupations with the most openings

• Highest paying occupations

• Job finder

• Jobs for people impacted Hurricane’s Katrina and Rita

• State occupational licensing requirements

• Certifications available in different occupations

. . . and the list goes on and on.

To save you some time, I’ll highlight a few of these tools and how they can help you with your market research.

Identify the 100 top jobs, and more

This link takes you to a page entitled “Fastest Growing Occupations.” And just like the name says, this is a list of over 500 of the occupations predicted to be the fastest growing in the time span between 2002 to 2014.

You may or may not find your exact occupation. But by using creative deduction you can put together your own assessment of industry and occupational trends that are applicable to you and your personal vision for your future.

Research specific top jobs of the future

This link takes you to the “Occupation Profile” search tool. This tool allows you to take a different approach (from the 100 fastest-growing jobs list in the last link) by enabling you to look up a specific occupation. You can either select from a dropdown “Menu Search” list of job familes, or enter your own job title of interest in the “Keyword Search” field.

For example, are you interested in construction management? Just follow these steps:

1. In the Keyword Search field, type in “construction management” and click the Search button. A list of relevant searches is displayed, with each listing preceded by its percent of search relevance. The list is in descending order from 100%.

2. Select one, in this case “100%, Construction Managers” and click the Continue button. A list of states is displayed.

3. Select a state, for example, Alabama, and click the Continue button. The profile for Construction Managers in Alabama is displayed.

You can now see that an 11% increase for Construction Managers is predicted in the state of Alabama during the span between 2004 to 2014, compared to 10% overall for the United States.

Now let’s say you’re curious about all the building activity you’ve been hearing about in Las Vegas. Repeat the steps above but this time select Nevada in Step 3. You’ll see that there’s a 49% increase in jobs predicated over the same ten year period.

But before you start packing your bags, you may want to ask yourself: What is my vision for my life? Maybe a move to Nevada would help you fulfill your vision. Or it may be taking you in exactly the wrong direction.

Identify Declining Occupations

This link takes you to the “Occupations with Declining Employment” page. While you’re looking at the growth side of the job market, it’s also useful to look at the occupations that are predicted to decline. Even if your specific occupation isn’t on the list of over 100, you can gain insight into how your industry may fair. If the news is pessimistic, you can still use what you learn as a springboard to gather more information.

Research Current Trends

A “one-stop” job search website that I’ve talked about before is indeed.com. This is a great resource for online job searches. It gives you access to all of the job listings from the major job-post boards, newspapers, associations, and company career pages—all on one page, in one search.

In addition to current job postings, indeed.com has also gathered over 35 million jobs from thousands of websites for the past year. You can search this archive and plot job trends over a one year time.

However, other than the advantage of providing one-stop shopping and the one-year archive, indeed.com doesn’t offer much else.

Other job posting websites offer a whole buffet of resources. So next time we’ll start to explore these the array of resources offered by sites such as careerbuilders.com and monster.com.

 © 2006 Gold Nugget Coaching

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