This Is the Career With the Best Job Security

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jun 21, 11:45AM EDT · Published Jun 18, 10:49AM EDT

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This Is the Career With the Best Job Security — © kzenon / Getty Images

The job market in the United States has changed considerably since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic began in March and April 2020, the U.S. jobless rate jumped above 10%. Since then, it has fallen to 3.6%. Employers in many industries scramble to get new workers today. Worker shortages in some of these sectors are extraordinary. This has made job security high in a number of professions.

As the job market recovered throughout 2021, there were a handful of professions that helped lower the unemployment rate. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were dozens of career fields that had unemployment rates well below 2% in 2021.

To determine the career with the best job security, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data on the unemployment rate for over 500 detailed occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey.

Most of the jobs we reviewed for best job security are in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields – particularly medical careers like pharmacists and nurse practitioners, as well as tech jobs like software developers and IT security analysts. These highly-specialized fields tend to pay well, mostly above the median annual wage across all jobs of $56,310.

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Nearly all of the jobs we looked at to determine the best job security typically require at least some form of secondary education – anywhere from an associate’s degree to a doctorate degree. However, a handful of these positions generally do not require any education beyond a high school diploma.

The career with the best job security is religious activities and education directors. Here are the details:

> Unemployment rate: 0.2%
> Labor force: 67,000
> Median annual wage: $45,110
> Projected employment change 2020-2030: +2.1%
> Typical entry-level education requirement: Bachelor’s degree

Methodology: To determine the career with the best job security, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data on unemployment rate for over 500 detailed occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey. Detailed occupations were ranked based on the percentage of the labor force that was unemployed as of 2021. Unemployed members of an occupational labor force need to have been last employed in this occupation prior to unemployment. Only occupations whose labor forces were 50,000 or greater were considered. Broad occupation titles classified as “all other” were excluded from consideration.

Supplemental data on median annual wage came from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics and are for 2020. Data on projected employment change from 2020 to 2030 and the typical education requirement for entry-level positions within the profession came from the BLS Employment Projections program.

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Click here to see all the careers with the best job security.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.