By | Morgan Smith | www.cnbc.com
Job growth will be stunted over the next 10 years amid a sharp decline in the country’s active workforce and an aging population, according to new analysis from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The U.S. is expected to add 11.9 million new jobs through 2030, only slightly more than half the 22.6 million jobs added in the 2010s.
And as some businesses prepare to triple their payroll, other industries will start to slowly disappear. After the coronavirus pandemic kept people out of stores and pushed them to shop online, retail trade is projected to lose more than 500,000 jobs by 2030, the most of any occupation.
The occupations that will experience the biggest decline over the next ten years fall into three categories: office and administrative support, sales and retail, and production. “These three groups make up the core of the U.S. middle class,” Bureau of Labor Statistics Division Chief Michael Wolf tells CNBC Make It. “They’re not the lowest skilled occupations, but they’re not the highest skilled ones either.”
Other fast-declining jobs are disappearing as more companies embrace automation and adopt productivity-enhancing technologies such as robotics and cloud-based software. More than half of the industries projected to face the toughest losses are in manufacturing, where international competition and new technologies have slashed jobs.
