10 High-Growth Jobs of Note in San Diego

This Center for Research + Evaluation report highlights 10 high-growth regional jobs based on key factors like job availability, easy entry, living wages for the region, and five-year historical growth.

In order to identify promising jobs in the San Diego area, an analysis of high-growth occupations was completed using data from 2024. Growth was measured in percent change in job numbers over the five years between 2020 and 2024, and projected growth was estimated between 2023 and 2033. This analysis is intended to help illustrate not only which jobs have a high growth, but also to consider related industries' economic impact on the region, and the quality of those occupations.

Methodology

Job growth, while informative, cannot be considered in a vacuum. Job availability is also an important component to include, and this was accomplished by limiting occupations to include only those that employed at least a thousand individuals in 2024 in San Diego. Additionally, to ensure that occupations were accessible to professionals without a graduate degree, occupations where the typical entry-level education required master's or doctoral degrees (PhD) were excluded.

Occupations were also filtered to only include those that provided a living wage for individuals living in the San Diego area. Median annual earnings were filtered to exclude those whose income was at or below the threshold set by San Diego's Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement ($43,804).

The top 20 occupations were then identified from the resulting list based on a rank of their percent job growth between 2020 and 2024, and the top 10 were determined based on an equally weighted combined ranking of job count, job growth, pay, employment concentration, and total GRP of the top five industries related to that occupation.

Finally, those 10 industries were then considered based on their projected growth[1] and five-year historical growth to provide a final ranking.

Results

The highest-ranked occupations, listed in Table 1, indicate Data Scientists and Substance Abuse, Behavioral Disorder, and Mental Health Counselors as showing the greatest growth in terms of five-year history, and Data Scientists and Medical and Health Service Managers predicted to show the greatest growth over the decade between 2023 and 2033.

Table 1

Figure 1 provides the context of both 5-year historical growth for these occupations as well as the count of individuals employed in those occupations in San Diego as of 2024, and Figure 2 shows projected growth. Data Scientists may have more significant growth than Project Management Specialists, but the latter has more than 5 times as much job availability (likely because it spans a broader range of industries).

Figure 1

Figure 2


Occupations are ranked in Figure 3 based on the total gross regional product (GRP) represented by the 5 most relevant industries to that occupation. For example, Web and Digital Interface Designers tend to work in industries such as Software Publishing, Custom Computer Programming Services, Computer Systems Design Services, Corporate, Subsidiary, and Regional Managing Offices, or Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services. Managers (those not included in narrowly defined titles) tend to work in Federal or Local Government, Corporate, Subsidiary, and Regional Managing Offices, or in research-related fields (Biotech or Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences).

Figure 3

Employment concentration and median annual earnings are the last two components of the analysis. They give insight into the earning potential of these occupations and the degree to which they are unique to the San Diego area. Pay ranges between $58K and $167K for the lowest and highest paying occupations (Managers, All Other, Substance Abuse, Behavioral Disorders, and Mental Health Counselors, respectively).

Employment concentration, also known as Location Quotient, is a ratio of regional jobs to national jobs and helps illustrate whether an occupation accounts for a larger-than-average "share" of total jobs. So, in the case of Life, Physical, and Social Science Technicians (All Other), Property, Real Estate, and Community Association Managers, and Food Service Managers, there is twice as large a share of that type of job in San Diego as compared to the nation as a whole. No occupation had less than the national average for any of the selected occupations.

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Footnotes

[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupational-projections-and-characteristics.htm
Projected growth estimates are provided at the national level and provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Five-year growth rates are sourced from Lightcast and provided for San Diego county specifically.

[2] As provided by ONet OnLine occupation descriptions: https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-2051.00