Industry Trends. Steps of Research

This morning, I had the idea to look at industry trends, I started with BLS, found some good data points on how things were in 1999 and the changes for each state. For example, the State of Alabama, the highest number of Jobs in 1999 were in manufacturing, and even in 2015 it was manufacturing 

While in NY it went from manufacturing to retail to healthcare. 

But overall, healthcare was a common theme across a lot of States! 

Click on link to see the above data – https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/major-industries-with-highest-employment-by-state.htm 

But this data did not really help me to evaluate which degree might have success in which state. What I mean by this is, if you did Petroleum Engineering, we know that Houston might be your best bet! 

And once you know that Houston is the place for a particular degree or job, you could check the unemployment rate for that city. 

https://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laummtrk.htm 

We see that Houston has a higher than average unemployment rate (3.4 is average, 3.6 is above average). 

This led me to do some more research on Houston and I realized that the only place I got some data that I could use, and trust was the City of Houston site. It explained the industries properly and the state of affairs. 

This is when I also realized that it is quite difficult to find the state of affairs for all industries in one go but we have to know which industry we are targeting and how many jobs they have open. 

A quick summary of my findings is 

1. Healthcare is growing in almost all states 

1. Construction industry is also doing very well in different cities, for example – Houston is booming right now with a lot of construction related projects. 

1. Automation industry is growing. 

1. Oil and Gas is awfully slow at the moment (this article was written in Feb 2020) 

1. Agriculture – different jobs within agriculture have different growth rates. More research is required. 

1. Retail – This one is a bit tricky. Retail jobs are plentiful right now but this is because a lot of people are shying away from this industry as there are a lot of changes on how goods are being sold. Because of the supply changes, there are jobs open. This could be a short term trend. 

Will keep researching and putting out Trend based articles. Comment below if you have any thoughts on what might be interesting for you and what you are struggling to get insight on. We might just be able to write a blog on it.