Last month, ABODO compiled a report detailing the best cities in the country for job seekers.
After a weaker than expected spring quarter, the U.S. job market posted consecutive months of steady upward growth.
As an apartment-finding service, we wanted to help our users identify the country’s fastest-growing employment categories in cities where they could find jobs.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the fastest-growing job categories from 2012-2015 were:
- Community and social service (15 percent)
- Computers and mathematics (14 percent)
- Health care practitioners and technicians (10 percent)
- Construction and extraction (nine percent)
- Art, design, entertainment, sports, and media (eight percent)
Instead of only looking at cities with the greatest number of these jobs—an approach that disproportionately favors cities with large populations—we tracked each occupations’ density per 1,000 jobs in each of the 25 most populous metro areas in the U.S.
In addition, we compared job concentration in each city to national concentration.
The ratio of the two concentrations gave us a location quotient, in which one represents the national average.
What resulted was a national heat map for various job categories.
Want to work in arts or media?
Move to Los Angeles, where concentration of jobs in that category is almost three times the national concentration.
Need a job in construction?
Houston is your best bet, with a location quotient of nearly two.
What About PR Jobs?
Public relations and marketing isn’t a broad occupation category for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yet, they do keep data on individual job types.
Let’s examine two PR and marketing jobs: PR specialist and advertising promotion and marketing manager.
Unsurprisingly, PR specialists jobs are most concentrated near major universities and government-heavy metro areas.
By far, the highest concentration of such jobs is in the Washington, D.C./Arlington, Va metro area.
They reach a location quotient four (meaning, four times the national concentration), and where seven jobs per 1,000 are in the field.
State capitals generally fare well, and these three respectively ranked number four, five, and eight for PR jobs in the U.S.
- Tallahassee, Fla (location quotient three, four jobs per 1,000)
- Austin (location quotient three, four jobs per 1,000)
- Jefferson City, Mo (location quotient two, four jobs per 1,000)
Mid-size college towns score high.
What they lack in sheer population and total job numbers, they make up for in concentration with these college towns boasting location quotients far above the national average:
- Olympia, Wash (location quotient four, six jobs per 1,000)
- Corvallis, Ore (location quotient three, four jobs per 1,000)
- Ames, Iowa (location quotient three, four jobs per 1,000)
- Columbia, Mo (location quotient three, four jobs per 1,000)
- Bloomington, Ind (location quotient two, three jobs per 1,000)
What the Numbers Say About Marketing Jobs
Three of the top 10 metro areas for marketing jobs are in Northern California, reflecting the large concentration of tech startups and businesses in Silicon Valley.
San Jose boasted a very high location quotient five, ranking the highest in the country with seven of every 1,000 jobs going to marketing managers.
The greater San Francisco area ranks number five, with a three location quotient and density of four marketing jobs per 1,000.
San Rafael boasts a location quotient two, and a three per 1,000 job density figure, good for 10th in the country.
These three east coast metro areas round out the top five:
- Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, Ct (location quotient four, five jobs per 1,000)
- Boston-Cambridge-Nashua (location quotient three, four jobs per 1,000)
- Newark, N.J. (location quotient three, four jobs per 1,000)
Emerging tech hub, Minneapolis, came in at number six, with a job density of four per 1,000 and a location quotient three.
Two Northwestern mainstays, Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro and Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, ranked number eight and number nine, both with location quotients of two.
As for job density, three of every 1,000 jobs in Portland and Seattle are marketing managers.
What About New York?
Again, our strategy was to measure density, not sheer number of jobs.
In both categories, the metro New York/New Jersey area boasted the highest raw number of jobs—24,560 for PR experts and 22,180 for marketing managers.
And, for each job, the location quotient was well above the national average.
The concentration of PR experts and marketing managers in New York City is two times the national average.
New York is a great place to find a job in marketing or PR.
But, a higher population concentration means you’ll be facing more competition.
For a more in-depth look at job density and concentration for a variety of fields around the country, take a look at our report.
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