Computing occupations are now the #1 source of new wages in America

A few weeks ago we published a study showing that computing occupations drive 16% of all new wages in the U.S. We just re-did the analysis to get a more accurate picture.

The result: Computing occupations are the largest category of new wages in the United States – ahead of management, healthcare, finance, engineering, sales, or any other category.

What changed? The short answer is: as we had noted in our previous analysis, some computing jobs were mis-categorized.

When we analyzed the data in April, we looked at the number of job openings in each Standard Occupational Classification (from the Conference Board), and calculated the new wages by multiplying by the average salary in each category (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

But these job categories had an issue which we noted in a footnote: the Standard Occupational Category 15 (computing occupations) also includes math jobs. Meanwhile, many of the other categories include computing occupations – jobs for software managers, hardware engineers, or computer science teachers.

We redid the analysis to properly categorize all computing occupations as one category, and to subtract math occupations. When properly categorized this way, computing occupations are the single largest category of new wages in the United States. (see the underlying data).

Of course, this analysis begs the question: if computing occupations are largest and fastest-growing category of new wages in the U.S., why isn’t the option to learn computer science offered in U.S. schools?

Additional detail: We removed category 15-2XXX (Mathematical occupations) from our count because these aren’t computing jobs. And we added the following categories in our classification of computing occupations: