Employment and wages in 24 newly tracked occupations

BLS uses the Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) system to group jobs with similar duties into occupational categories. When the SOC is updated periodically, new occupational titles are added. With the latest update, in 2010, 24 new occupations were added. Many of these new occupational titles are the result of technological innovations that have made it necessary to create new categories, such as solar photovoltaic installers, computer network architects, and genetic counselors.

Of the 24 occupations added with the 2010 update, computer network support specialists had the highest employment level at 184,570 jobs in May 2015, followed by computer network architects (146,600), and nurse practitioners (136,060). The occupations with the highest mean annual wage in May 2015 were nurse anesthetists ($160,250), followed by computer network architects ($103,100), and nurse practitioners ($101,260).

These data are from the Occupational Employment Statistics program. To learn more about these data, see "Occupational Employment and Wages — May 2015" (HTML) (PDF). The Standard Occupational Classification system is used to classify occupations for statistical purposes. To learn more about the new occupations added, see What’s New in the 2010 SOC.