Gallup has partnered with Amazon Future Engineer, Amazon’s global philanthropic computer science education program, to create the Careers of the Future Index (CFI). The public database aims to provide young adults and their advisers with transparent and useful data about the economic prospects of careers in the United States, and to inform industry and other stakeholders looking to invest in young adults’ career pathways.
The CFI references U.S. Census Bureau occupational classifications to provide a summary measure of each career’s economic prospects. The CFI combines the most recent career-level data on income, job growth, job vacancies per job seeker and automation risk to convey the economic strengths and weaknesses of various career paths. The goal is to highlight careers that both pay well and are likely to be available to applicants — now and in the future. The CFI provides scores ranging from 1 to 100 for all 529 occupations used by the Census Bureau to classify work. Higher scores on the CFI generally indicate higher pay, a high and growing level of job openings, and/or better prospects that the job will remain a viable option in the face of changes in technology.
This report summarizes the methods used to create the Gallup-Amazon CFI database and describes insights stemming from it. A more detailed description
of the methods used to construct the index is provided in the background section of this report.
The findings section of this report highlights three important insights that emerge from the CFI data.
- When comparing the CFI ranking for each occupation with that occupation’s popularity with students, it becomes clear that students overlook a number of high-opportunity careers. For this report, students’ career interests are determined by data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD periodically conducts a multi-country knowledge assessment that asks 15-year-olds, “What kind of job do you expect to have when you are about 30 years old?” Framed this way, the career question taps into not only students’ personal interests, but also their beliefs about what is possible. The latest PISA survey from 2018 shows many U.S. 15-year-olds are missing the mark when it comes to envisioning their future selves working in a viable and financially rewarding career. Aside from medical occupations, many of the top-ranking careers are rarely chosen by students, including jobs in management, computers, math and science — suggesting a lack of familiarity with career paths, which this report and the accompanying database are meant to address. More generally, comparing the popularity of each occupation with those occupations’ scores on the CFI reveals large opportunity gaps that students may want to be mindful of as they plan their futures. Furthermore, whether due to indecision, disinterest or lack of information, more than one in five 15-year‑olds (22%) cannot name any job they foresee themselves doing when they turn 30. Stronger academic performance is associated with more definite career plans as students who score in the top quintile on the PISA exam are 10 percentage points more likely to name a career than those who score in the bottom quintile.
- Comparing each job’s CFI score with the academic background of the workforce currently doing that job reveals that, while postsecondary education is extremely important to career success, it is not the whole story. Many high-scoring CFI occupations — including cardiovascular technicians, chief firefighters, construction managers and industrial product managers — are accessible to students without a bachelor’s degree. The majority of workers have less than a bachelor’s degree education in 5.8 million jobs spanning 27 careers that score at or above the average career held by a bachelor’s degree completer. Similarly, 34 top‑scoring occupations are accessible without an advanced degree, such as careers as an actuary, engineer or software developer.
- Comparing the CFI scores with the demographic makeup of the workforce in various occupations reveals American Indian, Black, and Hispanic workers are underrepresented in high-scoring careers — those scoring 80 or above on the CFI — but Black, Hispanic and White workers moved closer to parity with their workforce shares from 2010 to 2021. While diversification of the workforce parallels the increased diversity in the country as a whole over this period, the data reveal that high-scoring-CFI careers have generally diversified at a faster rate than low-scoring CFI careers. Men are slightly over-represented among top-scoring jobs, whereas women are slightly underrepresented. Female representation increased among the top-scoring jobs that were consistently coded between 2010 and 2021.
The report also serves as a reference guide to an interactive tool for exploring highlighted features of the data and accessing the complete occupational-level database. While other career tools and lists explore some of the same themes as the CFI, none match this database’s combination of high-quality data, rigorous methods, flexibility and transparency. Moreover, while scholars have previously ranked jobs by their capacity to withstand automation2, this is the first career tool to include such a measure alongside other features, and the first to allow users to see context on racial and gender proportionality.
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