How to Read a Career Growth Statistic

Why is the growth percentage the wrong number to lead with?

Because it answers a question nobody entering a trade is asking. Growth percent tells you the size of the occupation in ten years compared with today. Your teenager does not need the occupation to get bigger. Your teenager needs one job, once, in the next couple of years, and jobs come open for two reasons: the field expanded, or somebody left.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts both, and it publishes the combined figure as projected annual openings. Almost nobody quotes it. It is the most useful number on the page.

Here are four trades in the BLS 2024 to 2034 projection set, side by side.

Occupation	Employment, 2024	Growth, 2024 to 2034	Openings per year
Electricians	818,700	9 percent	About 81,000
Plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters	504,500	4 percent	About 44,000
Welders, cutters, solderers and brazers	457,300	2 percent	About 45,600
HVAC and refrigeration mechanics and installers	425,200	8 percent	About 40,100

Look at the welding row. BLS calls 2 percent slower than the average for all occupations, and the whole decade adds about 9,900 jobs. Read the growth column alone and welding looks like a closing door. Read the openings column and there are about 45,600 chances a year, more than plumbing, because the occupation is large and people retire out of it. Nearly all of that hiring is replacement, and replacement hiring spends exactly the same as growth hiring.

What is BLS actually counting in that openings number?

Openings equals net growth plus what BLS calls occupational separations, which is people leaving the occupation permanently: retirement, a move into a different line of work, leaving the labour force. It is an annual average over the decade, not a promise about next spring.

Two things follow from the definition, and both matter.

First, openings is always larger than employment change, usually by a lot. For electricians, BLS projects an employment increase of about 77,400 across the whole ten years, and about 81,000 openings in a single year. Those are not contradictory figures. The first is net growth over a decade, the second is annual hiring including replacement.

Second, you cannot add the openings figure to any other estimate of demand. It already contains replacement. Stacking a second number on top double counts.

How do I check the percentage against the base?

Multiply it out. This is the single habit that makes a parent harder to sell to.

BLS ranks wind turbine service technicians as the fastest growing occupation in the economy, at 50 percent from 2024 to 2034, and solar photovoltaic installers second, at 42 percent. Both are genuine BLS figures. Now the base.

Occupation	Employment, 2024	Growth, 2024 to 2034	Jobs added over the decade	Openings per year
Wind turbine service technicians	13,600	50 percent	About 6,800	About 2,300
Solar photovoltaic installers	28,600	42 percent	About 12,000	About 4,100
Registered nurses	3,391,000	5 percent	About 166,100	About 189,100

Fifty percent of a small occupation is a small number of jobs. Registered nursing grows at 5 percent, which sounds like nothing, and produces about 189,100 openings a year, which is more than electricians and plumbers combined. Percentage growth in a tiny occupation is the most abused statistic in this subject, and it is abused because it is technically true.

None of that means wind or solar is a bad idea. It means a headline calling something the fastest growing job in America is telling you about a rate, not about a hiring queue. Worth knowing too: BLS lists the typical entry credential for wind turbine service technicians as a postsecondary nondegree award, which is a certificate rather than an associate degree, and schools that describe a two year degree as the requirement are overselling the entry ticket.

What about the shortage headlines?

You will read that the country needs hundreds of thousands more electricians. Those figures are industry hiring need estimates, not BLS projections, and they measure something different: how many people a sector believes it would like to hire, often over an unstated period and often counting the same replacement hiring BLS already counts.

The correct handling is simple. BLS projects about 81,000 openings for electricians every year through 2034, roughly 77,400 of them representing net growth across the entire decade and the rest replacing people who retire or change careers. A shortage estimate from a trade association is a separate claim from a separate method, and the two cannot be added together or presented as agreeing with each other. If a school’s brochure puts a shortage number next to a BLS growth rate in the same paragraph, you are looking at two incompatible statistics dressed as one argument.

How do I read a BLS occupation page myself?

It takes about ninety seconds and you never have to trust a summary again.

1. Search the occupation title plus “BLS OOH” and open the page on bls.gov. Trade titles are sometimes bundled, so plumbers share a page with pipefitters and steamfitters.
2. Read the summary table at the top. It gives median pay with its reference period, the typical entry level education, the typical on the job training, employment in the base year, the growth rate, and the employment change over the decade.
3. Click the Pay tab for the percentiles. The 10th and 90th percentile lines are where the real spread lives, and they are the antidote to any single average.
4. Click the Job Outlook tab and find the openings sentence. It is the one that says how many openings are projected each year, on average, over the decade.
5. Write down the reference period for every number you take: wages are a month and a year, projections are a decade. Two numbers from different vintages do not belong in the same sentence.

What this looks like

Luca is sixteen and has been told by a video that wind turbine technician is the fastest growing job in the country. He is illustrative, but the numbers he is looking at are real.

He is right about the rate. BLS does project 50 percent growth for wind turbine service technicians from 2024 to 2034, first in the economy. His mother does the second step: the occupation employed 13,600 people in 2024, the decade adds about 6,800 jobs, and BLS projects about 2,300 openings a year including replacements, nationally, in an occupation clustered where the wind farms are.

Then they open the electrician page: 9 percent growth, a duller headline, about 81,000 openings a year. And the welding page: 2 percent growth, about 45,600 openings a year.

Nothing here tells Luca not to chase wind. The turbines are real, the pay is real, the BLS median for wind turbine service technicians was $62,580 in May 2024, and somebody fills those 2,300 openings every year. What the exercise tells him is that “fastest growing” and “easiest to get hired into” are different claims, and that he should be ready to move to where the work is if he picks the small, fast occupation. That is a fair thing for a sixteen year old to decide with his eyes open.

The two questions to ask about any career statistic

How many openings a year, and over what period was that measured. If a page cannot answer both, it is advertising. If you want to see the same discipline applied to money rather than headcount, do electricians really make 100,000 dollars does the wage version, and are the trades getting oversaturated uses the same openings figures to test the crowding worry.