The Most In-Demand Jobs on LinkedIn: Q3 2022

Seeing more busy restaurants lately? Thank your local restaurant worker — and your optometrist. 

Joking aside, these two jobs saw the sharpest spikes in demand over the past three months. Measured by the number of paid job posts on LinkedIn globally, demand for restaurant specialists more than tripled (3.2x), while demand for optometrists grew by 2.8x. 

Take a closer look at the latest rankings, below, and you’ll see a broader trend come into focus: Frontline and entry-level jobs dominate our list of jobs with the fastest-growing demand — with a few even breaking into the top 10 most in-demand jobs overall. Let’s see what employers can do to fill these frontline roles, and how candidates across industries are raising their expectations. 

This story was originally published on the LinkedIn Talent Blog. This series is updated on a quarterly basis to help talent professionals manage expectations, inform hiring decisions, and understand the changing landscape of the talent market.

Demand for frontline roles and entry-level positions grows rapidly, especially in restaurants and retail

Eight or nine of the top 10 jobs with rapidly growing demand could be considered frontline roles or entry-level positions. 

Frontline jobs are those that must be done onsite, putting workers in close contact with customers or coworkers. Since the start of the pandemic, companies have struggled to retain and hire these workers — many of whom now expect higher wages and better benefits to compensate for the risks and inconvenience of in-person labor. 

This trend isn’t new: Over a year ago, Karin Kimbrough, the chief economist at LinkedIn, suggested that “for in-person roles during COVID, there’s an added element of wanting to be compensated for a perceived risk,” and she warned that companies “would be remiss” if they’d didn’t consider raising compensation for these workers. 

In a recent interview with the BBC, David Dwertmann, an associate professor of management at Rutgers, suggested that offering candidates greater flexibility can also help fill these apparently “unfillable” service roles: “Employers need to react not just by increasing wages and providing sign-on bonuses, but also, for example, by scheduling employees in different way,” David said. “Making sure that there’s some predictability . . . so that they can, for example, manage childcare.” 

In recent months, some frontline roles have jumped into our top 10 ranking of the most in-demand jobs overall.

In a list that’s typically dominated by highly skilled technical roles, the jobs of driver and cashier both jumped over a dozen spots, while retail salesperson rose seven positions to make it into the top five. 

Since these rankings only reflect what jobs employers pay to post on LinkedIn, it’s possible that there’s always been a similar number of openings for frontline jobs — the biggest difference now may be that companies can no longer rely solely on word-of-mouth and help wanted signs to fill those frontline roles. 

Examining the outliers: Why demand is spiking for optometrists and tax accountants

Only two of the jobs — tax accountant and optometrist — with the fastest-growing demand buck the broader trend of frontline, entry-level work. 

Pardon the pun, but we can write off tax accountants: The recent spike is no surprise, since we regularly see big swings in demand for tax accountants, particularly around major tax deadlines in April and October. 

On the other hand, the increase in demand for optometrists really caught our eye (last pun, we promise). 

As we dug a little deeper, we came across these comments from the chief executive of a major eye care company, suggesting that the struggles with hiring optometrists aren’t so different from the struggles of hiring frontline workers. 

“There is a shortage of optometrists in America, an unusually high number of optometrists retired at the pandemic time,” Reade Fahs, CEO of National Vision Inc., said in a recent earnings call. (Note: National Vision Inc. is not necessarily included in this analysis of in-demand jobs, as LinkedIn’s job posting data is aggregated and anonymized prior to analysis.)

Along with a higher level of retirements, Reade suspects that flexibility could be a key driver of the current shortage, as it is for other parts of the workplace. “So people who were five-day doctors,” Reade surmised, “might say, ‘You know what, I have decided I’d like to be a four-day doctor.’”

Methodology

Based on global LinkedIn data on all premium job posts from April 2022 up to and including September 2022. The most in-demand jobs are those with the highest number of job posts in the most recent quarter (July 1 – September 30, 2022). The jobs with the fastest-growing demand are those with the greatest percentage growth in the number of job posts in the most recent quarter relative to the previous quarter (April 1, 2022 – June 30, 2022). Roles with fewer than 1,000 job posts in a quarter and roles for which the majority of job posts come from a single company were excluded from this analysis.