The 30 best jobs of the future

The above list of jobs both pay above the median wage and are poised to grow over the next decade. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases annual employment projections of how various jobs will grow or decline over the next decade. The latest release shows how occupations could change from 2020 to 2030. Overall, BLS forecasts that employment will grow by 11.9 million, from 153.5 million in 2020 to 165.4 million in 2030. 

Insider was interested in looking at jobs that pay well and that also may see more jobs added over the decade. To come up with our set of jobs that are expected to have bright futures ahead of them, we took the geometric mean of median annual wages and projected employment growth from 2020 to 2030 for each occupation. We then ranked occupations based on their geometric mean. A higher geometric mean would mean a higher rank.

Wage data is for May 2020 from the Bureau's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program that was released earlier this year. We only included jobs that pay at least $41,950, the median wage for all occupations, because we were interested in jobs that are both expected to grow and pay well. Based on this, several of the top jobs are medical, tech, or manager positions. 

It's important to note that some jobs in BLS' projections are are expected to grow a lot over the decade, even faster than the 7.7% increase for all occupations, but mainly due to recovery from jobs lost seen during the pandemic. 

"The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an economic recession from February to April 2020, which led to substantial and immediate declines in output and employment," BLS wrote in a news release for the employment projections. "Because 2020 serves as the base year for the 2020–30 projections, these recession impacts translate to lower base-year values than seen in recent projections and, therefore, higher projected employment growth."

In fact, BLS published two separate tables of the projected fastest-growing jobs. One of the tables consider all jobs and the other one BLS notes excludes "occupations with above average cyclical recovery," such as motion picture projectionists and restaurant cooks, both in industries that have been largely affected by the pandemic.

"Employment in the leisure and hospitality sector is projected to increase the fastest, largely driven by recovery growth, while the healthcare and social assistance sector is projected to add the most new jobs," BLS wrote in a news release.

Our previous ranking using the geometric mean of median annual wages in 2020 and 2019-2029 projections can be found here. That projection didn't take into account the pandemic's impact on employment since the data used was from before the pandemic. However, Insider also previously looked into BLS alternate projections for 2019-2029 that took into account the pandemic's impact on occupations and industries to see how job growth may be affected.