5 Jobs with the Biggest Pay Gains & Declines Now

Jobs that are highest paying aren’t always the ones that grow the most.

Thankfully, Glassdoor’s Local Pay Reports offer insight into which jobs are growing fastest in terms of pay so you can evaluate whether a potential career or job will pay off in the long run.

In December, the five jobs with the biggest year-over-year pay growth in the U.S. are:

1. Construction laborer (9.4 percent to $38,321)

2. Machine operator (7.6 percent to $38,558)

3. Customer service manager (7.4 percent to $50,526)

4. Warehouse associate (7.2 percent to $43,609)

5. Recruiter (6.7 percent to $51,833)

The common thread? According to Glassdoor’s Chief Economist Andrew Chamberlain, many jobs with the biggest year-ore-year growth are manual, working class jobs where demand continues to be high, which then drives up wages. In the professional sector, customer service managers and recruiters are seeing big wage gains likely due to many companies ramping up hiring and sales efforts given the new year. 

On the flip side, five jobs that saw biggest declines in pay compared to last year are:

1. Quality engineer (-2.9 percent to $73,338)

2. Communications manager (-1.7 percent to $65,954)

3. Professor (-1.4 percent to $91,514)

4. Mechanical engineer (-1.3 percent to $74,025)

5. Medical technologist (-1.2 percent to $52,802)

No need to panic. These numbers don’t mean that professors or quality engineers should jump ship, they simply give you more information about your field and show you the trends. Like the new tool Know Your Worth by Glassdoor, Local Pay Reports incorporate millions of salaries directly collected from U.S. workers by Glassdoor and apply a proprietary machine-learning algorithm to estimate trends in local pay.

The Local Pay Reports estimate year-over-year growth in median base salaries by job title for more than 60 jobs across more than 15 job categories including education, technology, retail and more. The reports also estimate median base pay by industry and employer size, and provide a monthly trend of metro-level median base pay for each local market over the past four years.

Our new Local Pay Reports fill an important gap in our knowledge about wage growth at the local level for specific jobs. Official BLS “Occupational Employment Statistics” are updated only once per year, and use broad occupational groupings that can be confusing for job seekers. Local Pay Reports are released monthly—using the latest data from Glassdoor—and show pay for actual job titles that are easy for non-economists to understand.

Want more? Check out the Glassdoor Local Pay Reports can be found here!

Source: Glass Door