The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employment outlook signals major shifts in the employment horizon over the next decade. You set yourself up for success by formulating a proactive strategy in light of these trends. Your PhD will continue to be valuable, but it's important to evolve your job search approach in line with the broader horizons. 

The BLS Forecast: A Slower, More Volatile Market.

The employment forecast points toward a decade of contraction and transformation, making job security scarcer and career path selection more critical than ever. Here are the three non-negotiable shifts you must acknowledge:

1. Slower Growth and Automation Risk

The BLS predicts slower wage and salary employment growth compared to the last decade. Simultaneously, automation is displacing jobs, especially those involving routine tasks that AI can handle.

As a PhD seeking a job outside of academia, you may no longer be able to rely on  broad market expansion to solve your job search.

However, despite the overall slowdown, there will be growth concentrated in a few pockets: health care (driven by the aging Boomer population) and roles related to AI as well as data science. 

2. The Skills Imperative

To remain competitive, you can align your skills with those high-growth areas. Here's how: 

• Healthcare: focus on roles where you can add value within this industry. For social scientists, this may include health policy, UX research, data analysis, or administration.
  
  
• Data science and AI: your expertise in research design, statistics, and quantitative methods will continue to be an asset for analytical work. Add on skills in leveraging LLMs to make yourself even more competitive.
  
  
• Management/leadership: experience managing teams to execute research projects in line with specific budgets and timelines will continue to be valuable, as management roles are not forecasted to contract alongside the broader market contraction.
  
  

3. The End of Employment Reliance

The traditional path of relying solely on full-time, benefits-attached wage employment is becoming riskier. Not only have we left the "one company for your whole life" environment our parents might have worked in, we now might not even be able to rely on regular, full-time employment. 

You can protect yourself by learning to generate your own employment — through freelance or contract work, or building a small business. This will give you market options and flexibility as insurance against volatility. 

More broadly, the trends make me nervous for folks' health insurance. The U.S. labor market yokes full-time employment to health coverage. What will happen to folks' health with lower participation rates in full-time employment? I'm not sure, but I foresee immense pressure on healthcare — which may itself be a disruptive opportunity if you see a way to get ahead of this shift. Individually, this will make planning health coverage a necessary part of your career strategy.    

Your Action Plan: Invest in Resilience

I am not an economist, so it's possible my reading of the BLS data is imprecise. But I am a social science PhD and a career coach who is seeing how these patterns are unfolding in individual lives. These trends are not necessarily a prediction of your doom, but are a call to heightened awareness and more intentional career strategy.

Your PhD background already makes you highly adaptable, but you do yourself a favor for the future by investing in resilience. Here are a few suggestions for how to get started: 

1. Skills Investment: Prioritize the skills needed for the growth sectors (AI/DS) or the human-centric sectors (Leadership/Management).
2. Network Investment: Your network provides job access and market intelligence that algorithms and broad-scale contraction cannot obviate.
3. Community Investment: Amidst these challenges, I believe success will be measured by how we support one another. Use your privileged access to knowledge to help those with fewer options. We can thrive, even in a tougher labor market, via resilience and collaboration.

That's where I remain hopeful even amongst these distressing trends. Use your understanding to formulate a strategy that will support you and your community as we move forward, together.