In a dreary labor market, there are a couple of bright spots: Medical jobs and specialty roles at data centers.
Over the past year, the healthcare sector has been one consistent stalwart. The latest jobs release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed that healthcare was still chugging along in September, albeit at a slower pace. Construction also put up a respectable showing of 11,000 roles on net, even after losing roles in residential specialty trade contractors.
Instead, gains were heavily concentrated in nonresidential specialty trade contractors — the electricians and other construction employees who work on data center builds, among other projects.
The healthcare sector added about 17,000 roles — a sizable chunk of the total 29,000 payrolls added in the country, but about half of the industry’s average gain of 33,000 jobs over the past year.
Despite healthcare’s slower job growth, Cory Stahle, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, said the sector offers opportunities in the long run, given the demand to care for the aging population. ZipRecruiter economist Nicole Bachaud said cooler healthcare hiring could be due to funding challenges that could be making it harder to pay for more workers.
“So the demand is there, but the execution on that demand is limited by the federal funding environment right now,” she said.
While the healthcare sector grew by 16,700 jobs over the month, the government sector fell by 17,000. White-collar sectors were also among those that lost jobs. The information sector has plummeted from its 2022 peak of 3.1 million total employed to 2.7 million last month.
Construction’s growth of 11,000 jobs was partly driven by nonresidential specialty trade contractors, in which employment rose by 12,300.
It’s a testament to how the data center boom — which is shaping up to be the largest capital expenditure project in US history — is propping up construction employment and spending. Indeed’s data showed that data center-related postings have surged by almost 130% since June 2024, while overall US postings have dropped.
“With the amount of money that’s being put into these data centers and into that employment, I imagine that also in the short term is going to be an area where we’ll see some continued growth,” Stahle said.
But just how viable data centers are as a long-term employment driver remains uncertain. Guy Berger, a senior fellow at the research organization Burning Glass Institute, said if the data center boom is shorter than expected, “all of a sudden, we trained a lot of electricians, people like that, to do stuff that is no longer needed.”
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