10 Most In-Demand Jobs Right Now

Nursing and sales jobs ranked high, but No. 1 may come as a surprise.

Jaroslav Pachy sr/Shutterstock

(Jaroslav Pachy sr/Shutterstock)

With unemployment at 5 percent nationally and the economic crisis of 2008 even further in the rear-view mirror, it’s a great time to examine which jobs are most in-demand.

Job search engine Indeed.com studied its vast database of job listings and identified the 10 most-in-demand occupations in the U.S.

Here’s a list:

1. Heavy and Tractor-Trailer Truck Driver

2. Registered Nurse

3. Customer Service Representative

4. Sales Representative

5. Sales Manager

6. Software Quality Assurance Engineer and Tester

7. First-line Supervisor of Retail Sales Workers

8. Operations Manager

9. Child Care Worker

10. Manager

The No. 1 job — heavy and tractor-trailer truck driver — may come as a surprise. Replacing healthcare jobs at the top of the list, truck drivers are in high demand because of the increased emergence of e-commerce sites like Amazon. The mean hourly wage is $20.16, according to BLS estimates in 2014. Currently, there are nearly 228,000 truck driving job openings on Indeed.

Registered nurse, with more than 201,000 job listings on Indeed, came in second place, falling from the top spot. The BLS estimates that 439,300 new jobs for registered nurses will be added between 2014 and 2024.

Forbes interviewed Tara Sinclair, Indeed’s chief economist, who said: “We’ve been hearing for a long time from trucking companies that they have trouble filling these positions, and RNs are the classic position where there seems to be more employer demand than seeker supply.”

Jobs related to sales, customer service, and retail take four spots on the list. Sinclair indicated that the sales and retail-related job demand is not just a reflection of the holiday shopping season, but show that there’s a long-term void to be filled in the industry.

While the most-in-demand jobs span across diverse sectors at a national level, that’s not the case in Philadelphia, where education and healthcare employ nearly one-third of the city’s workers, according to an annual report by the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce. Over the past decade, jobs in “eds and meds” increased by 20 percent, adding 39,950 new openings. Tourism and hospitality also saw nice job growth in Philadelphia at 18 percent with 9489 new jobs from 2002 to 2012.

Major industries that lost jobs in Philadelphia are manufacturing and financial services, losing 39 percent and 20 percent of their job totals, respectively.

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