Over the last few weeks, we've been sharing positive news about wages in every industry, metro and job category covered by The PayScale Index. In Boston, wages are up. For small companies? Same story. "But," you ask, "where are has wage growth been strongest and fastest of all?" One leader stands out: energy.
Wages in the mining, oil and gas exploration industry began their recovery from the recession well before those in other industries. By mid-2009, when earnings for construction workers would continue to drop for another two years, wages in the energy sector began a slow recovery that would gather speed by mid-2011.
"The demand for oil, combined with new technologies to extract it, have kept domestic oil jobs available and lucrative," says Katie Bardaro, PayScale's lead economist and the leader on the study.
A recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an energy industry research group, predicts a slow-down in the rate of increase of energy use in the U.S. through 2035, due to reduced population growth and more energy efficiency. But, U.S. domestic oil production is likely to grow, they say, because of improved technologies to get oil out of the ground.
Thus, the demand for workers in the oil fields should continue to grow and the pace of wage growth shows no sign of stopping. An average of 4.9 percent annual wage growth over the last year made mining, oil and gas exploration number one among all categories in Q3 2012 results. We'll see how that changes, or not, in the quarters to come.
| The PayScale Index uses 2006 average total cash compensation as a baseline. |
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