November 9, 1998 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

New occupations emerging across industry lines

Many emerging occupations—defined as those that are becoming "numerically important or emerging due to technological change"—are specific to the new or emerging industries they are born to. For example, resettlement coordinators are not often found outside of their social service niche, nor are bus aides found outside of educational services. However, there are some occupations that emerged in a fairly wide range of industries during 1996.

[Chart data—TXT]

The occupation with the most cross-industry coverage was administrative assistant, identified as emerging in 8 of the 10 major industry divisions. While this job title is hardly new, today’s administrative assistants are more likely to provide paraprofessional support to executive staff or to take on budgeting and other office management functions than to be filing, typing, or answering the telephone.

An occupation that has emerged in a surprisingly wide variety of industries—5 of the 9 major divisions—is convention manager. Convention managers coordinate the activities of convention center, hotel, and banquet personnel in order to make arrangements for group meetings and conventions. Among detailed industries, this occupation was reported often in membership organizations, business services, educational services, publishing, and social services.

Emerging occupations are identified by the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program. Employers are asked to provide a job title and description for the "all other" occupations that they believe are emerging, as defined above. OES staff reviews reports and determines which occupations are to be identified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as emerging. Additional information is reported in Issues in Labor Statistics: New Occupations Emerging Across Industry Lines, Summary 98-11. Detailed data are available from "Occupational Employment and Wages, 1996," Bulletin 2506, August 1998.