As of May 2019 the U.S. unemployment rate was 3.6%, the lowest in five decades.
Fewer than 6 million Americans are unemployed. Yet those numbers don’t reveal the quality of available jobs and the reality of wage stagnation.
The average American salary is about $60,000 or $900 a week. Still, decades of wage stagnation means that the buying power of today’s wages are about the same as it was 40 years ago.
Wages barely increased, rising by 0.2% annually in that time.
No matter how hard Americans work they can’t seem to get ahead as much as they want. About 13 million Americans work more than one job.
This amounted to more than 5.1% of the workforce in August 2018.
While we all can’t work the jobs we want, it doesn’t hurt to gain extra education or skills acquisition. For instance, there is one job that is considered the number one job in America, and it that has high vacancies.
The best job?
Data scientist has been listed as the number one occupation on job market website Glassdoor for four consecutive years.
The criteria for this designation includes occupational happiness, pay rate and number of available vacancies. A data scientist is someone who combines the roles of computer scientist, mathematician and social media trend analyzer.
Data scientists analyze and process the information generated by a business. They look for issues that could solve problems or optimize possible business opportunities. A data scientist can make more than $108,000 annually.
There were over 6,500 openings for this job this year.
The second-best job on Glassdoor’s list was nursing manager, which pays $83,000 annually and has almost 14,000 job openings.
Even though data scientists are in high demand, the reason why may be the rigorous education standards and skills required for the job. Almost 50% of data scientists have a PhD and most at least have a master’s degree.
To effectively analyze large amounts of business data most data scientists study statistics, mathematics, engineering, and computer science.
While it may be the number one job in America, getting that job requires a depth of knowledge for qualification that takes time and money to acquire.
