McKinsey Quarterly rightly points out that most US jobs are in retail, financial services and construction; and that cool emerging sectors like biotech are a very small share:

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However, when the BLS (the source of the data above) forecast jobs growth, it’s a little different:

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Retail and finance aren’t growing too much at all, but, unsurprisingly, healthcare is surging.  The first chart above places focus on retail jobs…the second says healthcare.  The single biggest growth section isn’t even IN the first chart.  Hmmm.

In workforce analytics, this happens far too often – we slice, dice, analyze and even obsess over the past (that’s what all our data represents, after all)…and we might not focus on the future at all.  And what a big boat that may well lead us to miss…so why, if that big boat is likely to have the biggest impact on the business, do we keep putting workforce analytics (analysis of the past) ahead of workforce planning (analysis of the future)?

 

Aside:  Each of these charts uses very different industry classifications, so it’s hard to see apples against apples – which is very often the problem with charts and datasets. Take care there