30 fast-growing, high-paying jobs that will dominate the digital workplace

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Technology is becoming ever more important in the digital workplace of the 21st century.
Using data from the Department of Labor, we found 30 high-paying, fast-growing jobs that rely on skills and knowledge from the STEM disciplines.

The 21st century workplace is increasingly dominated by technology, and jobs that rely on a mastery of those machines are likely to become more important — and lucrative.

We assembled a list of fast-growing, high-paying jobs that are set to dominate the emerging digital workplace through 2026.

The Department of Labor’s O*NET Online occupational database includes survey-based measures of several work characteristics for the nearly 1,000 occupations tracked by the database.

To get a sense of what jobs will thrive in the emerging digital workplace, we looked at nine skills, knowledge areas, and work-style characteristics that reflect the growing importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM): mathematics, science, engineering and technology, computers and electronics, programming, innovation, analytical thinking, general design, and technology design. If you have an interest or talent in any of the above, then congratulations, your work future is looking bright.

The O*NET database assigns importance scores to each job between 0 and 100 for each of these characteristics, with 0 indicating that the job doesn’t have that characteristic at all, and 100 suggesting that the characteristic is a major part of the job.

We averaged together the importance scores of the above skills to get an overall STEM score for each occupation. Because we are interested in high-paying, fast-growing jobs, we ranked those occupations with above-average annual salaries and growth prospects.

Specifically, we looked at occupations with an average salary in 2018 above the overall average of $51,960, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics program, and a projected employment growth rate between 2016 and 2026 above the projected total employment growth rate of 7.4%, according to the Bureau’s most recent employment projections data.

Here are the 30 jobs with above-average salaries and growth prospects with the highest STEM scores, along with descriptions of what each of the occupations entail from O*NET: