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BLS Employment Projections

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-2- Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2021–31 projections The COVID-19 pandemic prompted an economic recession from February 2020 to April 2020, leading to substantial declines in output and employment. While the recession only lasted a few months, the pandemic persisted through 2021, continuing to disrupt economic activity, prevent or discourage individuals from re-entering the labor force, and impact other economic conditions that affect employment. The economy rebounded in 2021, regaining approximately 4.6 million jobs; however, this equates to only about half of the jobs that were lost from 2019 to 2020. As a result, the 2021 annual average employment level, which forms the baseline for the 2021–31 projections, remained well below pre-pandemic levels. Employment in a majority of sectors continued to recover through the first half of 2022, and the 2021–31 projections do not reflect the employment recovery and reallocation that occurred during that time period. Some industries that have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic have lower base-year values and are expected to experience cyclical recoveries in the early part of the 2021–31 decade, as industry output and employment normalize and return to their long-term growth trends, leading to higher projected employment growth. (See the Technical Note for discussion of the difference between cyclical and structural changes.) Projected rapid growth for industries in which employment fell in 2020 and remained low in 2021 also is expected to result in strong growth for the occupations employed by those industries. For instance, many movie theaters were not operating at full capacity in 2021, resulting in a lower employment level in the motion picture and video exhibition industry in 2021 than in pre-pandemic recent history. This industry is projected to grow 70.5 percent over the 2021–31 decade, on account of a cyclical recovery in employment rather than a long-term structural increase in demand for motion picture and video exhibition. In turn, motion picture projectionists; and ushers, lobby attendants, and ticket takers—occupations highly concentrated in the industry—are also expected to experience strong cyclical growth. In addition, some industries and occupations are projected to have altered long-term structural demand arising from economic changes spurred by the pandemic. For example, many computer occupations are expected to have elevated long-term demand, in part due to increased business demand for telework computing infrastructure and information technology (IT) security. Data users should therefore bear in mind that fast growth rates in this projections set can be cyclically driven, structurally driven (in the long term), or driven by a combination of cyclical and structural factors.

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