The labor market’s soft landing ‘is in danger,’ economist says. Here’s where jobs are still growing

Job seekers have been sour on the job market for awhile now — and with good reason.

“The soft landing in the U.S. labor market is in danger,” Nick Bunker, Economic Research Director for North America for Indeed Hiring Lab, wrote in a statement on Friday.

“Yellow flags had started to pop up in the labor market data over the past few months, but now the flags are turning red,” Bunker said. 

While some market areas like the information services sector posted a loss of 20,000 in Friday’s jobs report, other sectors might still have “Help Wanted” signs on their doors. 

If you’re currently battling through a competitive labor market, here are the sectors that are hiring and how you can transfer your skills to pivot into a different field, according to experts.

Job growth in the U.S. slowed more than expected and the unemployment rate bounced higher, according to the latest information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nonfarm payrolls grew by just 114,000 in July, down from 179,000 in June, the agency reported on Friday. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate increased to 4.3%, the highest since October 2021.

A key driver in the July’s unemployment rate was an increase in “job loser unemployment,” or temporarily laid-off workers, Bunker said. This can happen in the manufacturing sector, he said.

“They are unemployed, but their connection to their old employer isn’t entirely severed,” Bunker said. “Their probability of finding a job in the next six months is much higher than other unemployed workers.”

The jobless rate is also driven by young workers under the age of 24 facing increased competition, said Alí Bustamante, a labor economist and director of the Worker Power and Economic Security program at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank based in New York City.

“The only constants in this labor market over the last 18 months have been government jobs, health-care jobs and construction, too, remarkably,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

A small share of the private sector is adding jobs, according to Bunker.

“It’s not like the broad share of sectors is adding jobs right now,” he said.

Health care and social assistance took the lead in job creations by adding 64,000 openings, according to the BLS. Other growing sectors include construction (25,000); leisure and hospitality (23,000); government (17,000); transportation and warehousing (14,000); wholesale trade (4,300); retail trade (4,000); and manufacturing (1,000).

It can be hard to optimize the job search on a growing sector because of cyclical market fluctuations, economists said.

But if you were to make a career pivot, “health care does make sense,” Bunker said.

In some cases, that might involve going back to school, Pollak said.

“We see incredibly high demand in health care throughout every level of job for registered nurses, for nursing assistants,” she said.

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Training in skilled trades is a way to go as well, she added. Some fields are seeing a strong demand, especially those where the workforce is aging and on the brink of retirement, and industries that are unlikely to be disrupted by artificial intelligence automation, Pollak explained.

“It’s the skilled trades, like an electrician or a [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] technician, where we see insatiable demand from employers and rising wages,” she said.

Because the labor market is weakening, it might be hard for workers to find opportunities in their preferred industries, Bustamante noted.

Looking at other occupations and other industries that may have a similar occupation than the one that they were looking for could be a start, he said.

Say, for example, “you’re an IT worker and you want to work at a startup firm,” said Bustamante. It might be difficult to find an opportunity there, but perhaps looking into the medical field or in government service, which is “doing pretty strong hiring as well,” could be fruitful, he said.

It’s really about not just looking at the industries but “really looking at the occupations and where those occupations or opportunities are really present at the moment,” Bustamante said.

Pollak agreed: “Definitely look at things where you have transferable skills.”

Job seekers can become better competitors by making these kinds of changes: tailoring the resume, browsing job listings, applying right away and seeing that “AI can be your best friend,” from resume rebuilding, interview preparation to discovering roles, she said.