Advance your career

LinkedIn Data Reveals the Most Promising Jobs of 2017

Introducing the most promising jobs in America based on the potential for career advancement, job growth and salary.

Job hopping has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and is only accelerating. Based on our research, we know that the top reasons people change jobs is to pursue a stronger career path, make more money or access more opportunities within their organization. Finding a job you love with one or more of these components can feel like a challenge, so we did some of the work for you.

To help you make more informed career decisions, we used LinkedIn data to put together LinkedIn’s inaugural list of the Most Promising Jobs of 2017. This highlights the jobs with high median salaries, strong job openings and year-over-year growth, and the jobs most likely to lead to a promotion or advancement within an organization. We also tapped into our data from millions of member profiles to uncover the top skills associated with each job.

1. Hospitalist
Median Base Salary: 
$222,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 1,000+ (87%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 6.0
Top Skills: Healthcare Management, Inpatient Care, Electronic Medical Record, Patient Safety, Internal Medicine

2. Pharmacist
Median Base Salary:
 $123,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 3,300+ (45%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 5.0
Top Skills: Medication Therapy Management,Community Pharmacy,Patient Counseling,Pharmacy Automation,Immunization

3. Sales Engineer
Median Base Salary: 
$80,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 3,000+ (159%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 6.0
Top Skills: Solution Selling, Sales Management, Project Engineering, Automation, Sales Engineering

4. Site Reliability Engineer
Median Base Salary: 
$140,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 300+ (93%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 8.0
Top Skills: Linux, Python, Bash, Apache, Shell Scripting

5. Product Manager
Median Base Salary:
 $97,500
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 3,000+ (11%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 8.0
Top Skills: Product Development, Competitive Analysis, Product Launch, Cross-Functional Team Leadership, Marketing Strategy

6. Financial Analyst
Median Base Salary:
 $64,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 2,500+ (27%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 8.0
Top Skills: Accounting, Microsoft Excel, Financial Modeling, Variance Analysis,Forecasting

7. Technical Program Manager
Median Base Salary:
 $129,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 500+ (49%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 8.0
Top Skills: Agile Methodologies, Software Project Management, Software Development Life Cycle, Scrum, Cloud Computing

8. Program Manager
Median Base Salary
$97,400
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 2,300+ (17%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 7.0
Top Skills: Project Management, Project Portfolio Management, Project Delivery, Vendor Management, Business Process Improvement

9. Data Engineer
Median Base Salary: 
$105,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 900+ (85%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 8.0
Top Skills: Hadoop, Python, SQL, Big Data,Hive

10. Scrum Master
Median Base Salary:
 $100,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 400+ (104%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 8.0
Top Skills: Agile Methodologies, Software Project Management, Scrum, Requirements Analysis, SQL

11. Software Engineer
Median Base Salary:
 $94,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 10,000+ (13%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 6.0
Top Skills: Java, C++, SQL, Linux, XML

12. Clinical Nurse
Median Base Salary:
 $75,700
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 3,300+ (77%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 6.0
Top Skills: Patient Safety, Hospitals, Critical Care, Inpatient Care, Acute Care

13. Physician Assistant
Median Base Salary:
 $104,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 2,800+ (37%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 4.0
Top Skills: Advanced Cardiac Life Support, Basic Life Support, Electronic Medical Record, Emergency Medicine, Family Medicine

14. Business Analyst
Median Base Salary:
 $70,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 3,000+ (20%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 8.0
Top Skills: Requirements Analysis, Business Requirements, Software Development Life Cycle, User Acceptance Testing,Visio

15. Tax Manager
Median Base Salary:
 $103,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 1,000+ (52%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 6.0
Top Skills: Income Tax, Corporate Tax, Tax Accounting, International Tax, Tax Advisory

16. Data Architect
Median Base Salary:
 $122,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 500+ (26%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 6.0
Top Skills: Data warehousing, Data modeling, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load),Business Intelligence,Databases

17. Anesthetist
Median Base Salary: 
$156,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 400+ (148%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 4.0
Top Skills: Critical Care, Anesthesia, Advanced Cardiac Life Support, Intensive Care, Hospitals

18. Analytics Manager
Median Base Salary:
 $109,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 400+ (49%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 8.0
Top Skills: Data Analysis, SAS, Business Intelligence, Data Mining, Predictive Analytics

19. Customer Success Manager
Median Base Salary: 
$72,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 350+ (85%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 10.0
Top Skills: Account Management, CRM, Salesforce.com, SaaS, Enterprise Software

20. Medical Director
Median Base Salary:
 $230,000
Job Openings (YoY Growth): 1000+ (3%)
Career Advancement Score (out of 10): 6.0
Top Skills: Medicine, Clinical Research, Healthcare Management, Healthcare Information Technology, Electronic Medical Record

While this list is mostly made up of jobs in finance, technology and healthcare, there are millions of open roles to explore on LinkedIn.

If you’re thinking about starting a new career in 2017, take these four steps to prepare yourself:

  • Update your LinkedIn profile. 9 out of 10 company recruiters use LinkedIn. So should you. The more complete your LinkedIn profile is, the more you’ll be noticed by recruiters who are looking for talent. Make sure you have an updated profile picture, job experience, education and industry information and you’ll be one step closer to a promising new position.  

  • Consider a new industry or role. Often, a shift in the role or industry you’re working in results in a higher salary or more promising path to promotion. You can explore how a promotion or industry change can affect your salary by using LinkedIn Salary.

  • Learn a new skill. Take some time to explore new career paths you may be interested in and the skills associated with them. It may even be time to learn something new with LinkedIn Learning.

  • Start your search. Start browsing for jobs on LinkedIn. Explore company pages and open job listings to find the perfect job for you.

This could be the start of a promising new career.

#StartSomething

Methodology

Job rankings were based on a weighted score across five areas: salary, career advancement, number of job openings in the U.S., year-over-year growth in job openings, and widespread regional availability. We looked at data from member profiles, job openings and salaries to rank the best jobs for career opportunity. If the scores were tied, we ranked the title with the most open job listings higher.

About the measures and weights for each area:

  • Salary (30%) - The median base annual salary for all job titles that have at least 40 entries collected in LinkedIn Salary in the U.S.

  • Career advancement score (25%) -  Titles most likely to lead to a promotion or internal transfer, based on the percentage of members employed at the end of 2015 who then started a new position at the same company during 2016. This score weighting is relative to the all job titles listed for millions of LinkedIn members.

  • Job openings (20%) - The raw number of current job openings for each job title.

  • Job openings YoY growth (15%) - The year-over-year growth in job postings for each job title from 2015 to 2016, based on the percentage change in average daily openings. We only considered roles that had growth YoY.

  • Regional availability (10%) - The number of regions currently hiring for each job title.

  • Top Skills (not weighted) - Skills which are most probable to be listed on a profile with that job title as compared to other titles.