Despite rising inflation and weakness in the economy, the U.S. jobs market remains strong. As CNBC reports, the unemployment rate in July was down to just 3.5%—the lowest level since 1969. Average hourly wage growth was also up 5.2% year over year. In short, employers are hiring and the market for job seekers remains strong. But for employers, this translates into problems finding the skilled workers they need to fully staff their business.
A new Future Workforce Report from freelancing platform Upwork sheds some light on just what types of jobs hiring managers are struggling to fill most right now. The report reveals that while 69% of hiring managers say they plan to increase staff levels over the next six months, 60% of them say they are having problems finding quality talent to fill the available positions.
According to Upwork’s Future Workforce Report, these are the job categories hiring managers need to fill most urgently (the percentage indicates how many mentions a job category received from hiring managers who took part in the survey):
- Accounting: 33%
- IT & Networking: 30%
- Operations: 29%
- Customer Support: 27%
- HR: 25%
- Finance: 19%
- Admin Support: 18%
- Sales: 18%
- Web, Mobile, Software Development: 14%
- Marketing: 12%
- Data Science & Engineering: 11%
- Design & Creative: 8%
- Architecture & Engineering: 6%
- Writing & Content: 4%
The report also reveals that the roles hardest to hire for, according to hiring managers, are those in the Data Science and Analytics (60%), Architecture and Engineering (58%), and IT & Networking (58%) categories. As a result of finding it hard to obtain permanent staffing, Upwork’s report found that 60% of hiring managers plan to rely on freelancers over the next six months.
Upwork’s Future Workforce Report was compiled from a representative survey of 1,000 U.S. hiring managers.
