Looking for a job? Whether you just graduated or are simply looking to make a change, it might be time to reconsider your location — not all cities are created equally. And which city will give you the most opportunity largely depends on what career path you’ve chosen.
Nationally, the unemployment rate is holding at less than 5% — down from a 2009 high of around 10% — and the job market is seeing steady growth. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of that growth between 2012 and 2015 has taken place in a few key sectors.
HOW THE TOP 25 CITIES STACK UP
The United States is very large, and the smaller the town, the more distorted employment figures can be. So in order to put some boundaries on our study, we limited our research to the top 25 most populous cities in the United States (according to U.S. Census Data), and found job density data for the country’s five fastest-growing occupations.
The chart gives us a great idea of which cities offer the most jobs in a given category. For example, nearly 125 of every 1,000 jobs in San Diego is in computers and math. In New York City, 52.8 of every 1,000 jobs is in heath care.
But these are enormous cities with huge job markets, so how much can that tell us about the odds job-seekers in those occupations face?
To make this information more accessible, we made use of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ location quotient, which compares an occupation’s prevalence in a specific location to its national prevalence, based on total employment instead of total population.
The location quotient is a ratio of ratios, comparing the local ratio of a specific occupation to total employment to the analogous national ratio. A value of 1 indicates that a job’s density is equal to the national average; a figure above or below 1 shows a relative strength or paucity of jobs, compared to the national figure.
In nearly every case, metropolitan areas were among the best places to find jobs in the country’s fastest growing occupations. There was one exception: farming, fishing, and forestry occupations.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the sector grew 7.95% from 2012 to 2015, adding 79,000 jobs nationwide. But for each city in our list, farming, fishing, and forestry occupations showed location quotients below 1.
These results prove a somewhat unsurprising point: farming, fishing, and forestry jobs are found largely outside outside of metropolitan areas. It’s a growing field, but it’s a decentralized, rural one.
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