10 High-Growth Jobs of Note in San Diego

When considering the employment landscape of a region like San Diego, it's important to look at growth in occupations when highlighting industries of particular interest. For this analysis, high-growth areas were selected using 2025 data, with growth measured as the percent change in job numbers over the 5-year period from 2021 to 2025. 

Projected growth was estimated between 2026 and 2036[1]. This analysis is intended to illustrate not only which jobs have high growth rates, but also the economic impact of related industries on the region and the quality of those occupations.

Methodology

While job growth is informative, it's also important to consider growth within the wider context of a job. For example, how available a given job is. A job category that grew by 300% in a single year isn't truly impactful if there were only 2 jobs to begin with. For this reason, occupations were limited to those that employed at least 1,000 individuals in San Diego in 2025. Additionally, to ensure that occupations were accessible to professionals without a graduate degree, those in which the typical entry-level education required a master's or PhD were excluded.

To avoid highlighting high-growth jobs that do not provide a living wage for the area, occupations were also filtered to only include those with a median annual earnings of at least $67,783. This threshold was selected based on a 2025 self-sufficiency income study for San Diego County, produced by the Health and Human Services Agency of San Diego County[2].

From there, the top 20 occupations were selected based on a rank of their percent job growth between 2021 and 2025, 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 5 industries related to that occupation.

Finally, those 10 industries were then considered based on their projected growth[3] and five-year historical growth to provide a final ranking.

Results:

The highest ranked occupations are listed below (Table 1), with Data Scientists, First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives, Medical and Health Services Managers, Food Service Managers, Transportation, Storage, and Distribution Managers, Project Management Specialists, Web and Digital Interface Designers, Civil Engineers, Software Developers, Property, Real Estate, and Community Association Managers predicted to show the large growth over the decade between 2026 and 2036.

Table 1. Ranking of promising occupations in San Diego based on job growth

Descriptions as provided by ONet OnLine occupation descriptions:https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-2051.00

The context of 5-year historical growth for these occupations and the count of individuals employed in San Diego as of 2025 (Figure 1) is shown above projected growth (Figure 2). Data Scientists may have more significant growth than Software Developers, but the latter have nearly 10 times as much job availability.
 

Figure 1. 2025 San Diego Job Count and 5 Year Percent Growth In Key Occupations

Figure 2. Percent Employment Change Projections, 2026-2036

Occupations are ranked on the total gross regional product (GRP) represented by the 5 most relevant industries to that occupation (Figure 3). For example, Civil Engineers tend to work in industries related to architecture, the federal government (both civilian and military), local government, and nonresidential building construction. Software Developers tend to work in computer systems design, scientific research, technical manufacturing, software publishing, and in company/enterprise management.

Figure 3. Top Related Industries

Employment concentration and median annual earnings are the last two components of the analysis (Figures 4 and 5) and give insight into the earning potential of these occupations and the degree to which these occupations are unique to the San Diego area. Pay ranges between 74K and 160K for the lowest and highest paying occupation (Food Service Managers, and Medical and Health Service Managers, 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 Property, Real Estate, and community Association Managers, there is twice as large a share of that type of job in San Diego as compared to the nation as a whole. There is nearly twice the share for Food Service Managers and Civil Engineers as well.

Figure 4. Median Annual Earnings[1]

[1] The most recent median annual earnings data available is for 2024 (Lightcast).