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Help WantedIf the federal government can't accurately forecast which jobs will grow, can anyone do it?

By Jacob Leibenluft
Posted Monday, July 21, 2008, at 3:29 PM ET
A makeup artist. Click image to expand

If the Bureau of Labor Statistics could predict the future, makeup artistry might look like a very good career right now. The government agency—perhaps best known for publishing the nation's unemployment rate every month—released a forecast late last year predicting which jobs would grow fastest over the next decade. Once it crunched all the numbers, the bureau reported that makeup artistry would be the seventh fastest-growing occupation in America from 2006 to 2016, between personal financial advisers and medical assistants. Overall, the bureau said, the number of jobs in the field would grow by a whopping 39.8 percent over the decade.

Soon enough, makeup schools were advertising opportunities to get trained in one of the "hottest careers" in the country. Stories from the New York Times to CareerBuilder.com noted that makeup artists made the BLS' fastest-growing list.

The problem: There are only about 2,000 makeup artists in the country right now. Even if the field expands at the dramatic pace the BLS projects, that growth will only translate into a few hundred job openings over the entire decade. There may soon be a lot of people singing "Beauty School Dropout."

Despite such potential for misinterpretation, the BLS occupational projections (PDF) are almost certainly the most influential economic statistics you've never heard of. They appear just about anywhere you might look for information about your next job: on Web sites like Monster.com, at local job-search agencies, in high-school guidance offices and college career centers. States use the national data to produce their own estimates, helping job seekers from Alabama to Washington figure out where the hot jobs are in their communities.

The demand for these numbers is obvious: Everyone looking to start a career or switch jobs wants some confirmation that they aren't entering a dying industry. And the projections—which are issued every two years—provide the kind of easy lists that are the bread and butter of your local newspaper's "Jobs" section.

The only problem is that projecting exactly which jobs will grow and which will shrink is a nearly impossible task. And, sure enough, the BLS is often wrong.

Take the late 1980s projections for the year 2000. According to an analysis published by the bureau (PDF), among the job categories predicted to expand at a "much faster than average" clip, about one-quarter either fell below the average growth rate or even shrank. Most egregiously, the bureau projected that the number of travel agents would grow by 54 percent—failing to anticipate that the rise of Priceline and Expedia would actually cause the industry to shrink. Data-processing equipment repairers and medical secretaries had a much worse decade than the bureau predicted; welders and cable installers did much better.

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Jacob Leibenluft is a writer from Washington, D.C.
Photograph of a model having makeup applied by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images.
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