Best and Worst Jobs for Wage Growth [infographic]

Transportation and IT Climb Fastest In Q2 Doing any hiring in the coming weeks or months? Making salary decisions will be easier if you have up to the minute information on the trajectory of wage growth in your industry. As we reported last week in "Wages Are Up...Everywhere," the Q2 2012 results from The PayScale Index, reveal that for the first time since 2009, wages are up in every industry and job category tracked by the Index.

July 16, 2012

Transportation and IT Climb Fastest In Q2

Doing any hiring in the coming weeks or months? Making salary decisions will be easier if you have up to the minute information on the trajectory of wage growth in your industry. As we reported last week in “Wages Are Up…Everywhere,” the Q2 2012 results from The PayScale Index, reveal that for the first time since 2009, wages are up in every industry and job category tracked by the Index.

Some wages are rising faster than others, though. Transportation and IT jobs, the two job categories that saw the most year-over-year growth out of the 19 job categories covered, experienced wage increases of over 3 percent since Q2 2011.

On a quarterly basis, The PayScale Index tracks changes in wages for full-time, private sector employees. See how the job roles your company employs fared in the job category rankings.

While transportation and IT grew the most in the past year, they lag behind others in growth over the longer term. By the end of Q2 2012, healthcare, architecture and engineering, and science and biotech jobs had the best earnings growth since 2006. On the other end of the scale, meager growth in wages for food service and retail workers was hardly a surprise in these still tight times. But, the traditionally lucrative legal jobs took came in near the bottom in the rankings which was, perhaps, more unexpected.