A peek at future jobs shows growing divides

Projections see overall growth continuing to slow

A decade from now, the U.S. economy could look much the way it does today — only more so. More dominated by the service sector amid the continued erosion of manufacturing jobs. More polarized in both earnings and geography. More tilted toward jobs that require at least a bachelor’s degree.

That, at least, is the future foreseen by experts at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The federal agency last week released its projections of what the U.S. employment picture will look like in 2026. (The estimates are based on long-term trends, not the short-term strength or weakness of the economy.)

The projections reflect some familiar patterns. Jobs in health care and clean energy will continue to grow rapidly. Manufacturing jobs will shrink, as will occupations involving data entry or other tasks that are increasingly being done by machines or algorithms. Overall job growth will continue to be slow, partly as a result of the aging of the baby boom generation; by 2026, even the youngest boomers will be approaching retirement.

Those trends don’t matter just to economists. The government’s projections, released every two years, are used by school guidance counselors to advise students, by colleges to design curriculums and by workforce development agencies to direct displaced workers into training programs.

The projections aren’t perfect. A decade ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics underestimated the impact of the rise of e-commerce on retail employment, and it projected a big increase in office clerk jobs that, because of automation, never came. But the government’s experts accurately foresaw many of the most important employment trends, including the growth of jobs in health care and computer programming and the continued decline of blue-collar jobs in manufacturing.