94% of Job Openings Have Nothing to Do With Growth [2026]

Oct 14

Signal vs. Noise · Aging Out Board

Two-Thirds Replacement: The Openings Are Not Where the Growth Is

Every piece of career advice you have ever read points at about six percent of the job market.

By Scot Free

The Aircraft Maintenance Technician blueprint opens on a figure from the aviation industry: roughly two-thirds of new technicians entering the field are replacing someone who left, not filling a newly created job.

That number turns out to be the optimistic version.

Across the whole American economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that about 94% of job openings have nothing to do with growth. They exist because somebody left.

The equation nobody reads

BLS publishes a number called occupational openings, and almost everyone who quotes it has never read its definition. Here it is:

Occupational openings = net employment change + occupational separations

The first term is what everyone means by "job growth." The second term is everyone who permanently left the occupation, and BLS splits it in two:

Labor force exits — people who stopped working or looking for work. Mostly retirement, though not entirely.
Occupational transfers — people who are still working but permanently moved into a different occupation.

BLS is blunt about which term dominates. In most occupations, openings from separations of existing workers provide many more opportunities than employment growth does, and the agency calls separations the primary driver of job openings.

Put numbers on it. Total employment is projected to grow 5.0% from 2025 to 2035, and roughly 93.7% of projected annual openings are replacement demand rather than net job growth. A state labor agency running the same math on an earlier cycle got 94% separations and 6% growth.

Six percent. That is the share of the job market that "pick a growing field" is actually describing.

What this does to standard career advice

Nearly every piece of guidance a person receives — from a school counselor, a career site, a "fastest-growing jobs" listicle, a well-meaning relative — sorts occupations by projected growth rate.

Growth rate measures the 6%.

Work the electrician numbers, because they're stark. BLS projects about 72,700 annual openings. Of those, roughly 7,590 a year correspond to net employment growth. The other 65,000 are people leaving.

Now imagine two occupations. One is growing 15% and produces 2,000 openings a year. The other is growing 3% and produces 40,000. Every ranked list puts the first one on top. Every actual job seeker is better served by the second.

This is not a flaw in the BLS data. The agency publishes openings, separations, exits and transfers as separate series, all free, all on the same page as the growth rate. It's a flaw in what gets quoted from it.

The part that complicates this site's own board

Here is where honesty costs something, because the next number undercuts a framing I have used on every blueprint.

The Aging Out Board is built on replacement demand, and the name implies retirement. But separations split into two halves, and for several seats on that board, the transfers half is larger than the retirement half.

Electricians again: of roughly 65,000 annual non-growth openings, about 22,100 come from labor force exits and about 43,100 come from occupational transfers. Nearly twice as many openings are created by electricians moving into a different occupation as by electricians retiring.

So the honest version of the Replacement Ratio column on every blueprint on this site is: openings created by people leaving this seat — some retiring, some going somewhere else. "Aging out" describes one half of that accurately and the other half not at all.

Does that break the board's argument? No, and here's why, stated carefully:

A seat is open either way. From the standpoint of someone trying to get in, it does not matter whether the previous occupant retired or became a supervisor. The vacancy is identical.
Transfers out are also evidence of a ladder. An occupation that loses 43,100 people a year to other occupations is an occupation people move up and out of — which is what the substation rung above the electrician rung actually is.
But the demographic claim needs its own evidence. If a blueprint says a seat is emptying because of retirements specifically, that should rest on an exit rate or an industry workforce study, not on the openings number alone. That distinction is now part of the standard here.

Why the number changed in 2016, and why it matters

One more thing worth knowing, because it explains why older advice is built on a smaller number.

From 1991 through the 2014–24 projections, BLS used a cohort-component method that estimated "replacement needs." That method excluded occupational transfers entirely, so it undercounted openings. The current separations method arrived with the 2016–26 projections after a lengthy development process, including a Federal Register solicitation of comments.

The practical effect: anyone whose mental model of the job market was formed before about 2017 — which includes most people giving career advice today — is working from a framework that counted roughly the retirement half and ignored the transfer half.

What to do with this

1. Sort by openings, not by growth rate. On any BLS occupation page, the annual openings figure is published right next to the growth percentage. It is the bigger and more useful number and it takes no extra effort to read.

2. Divide openings by current employment. That gives you an annual turnover rate — roughly how much of the occupation changes hands each year. Nine percent means the door opens often. Two percent means you are waiting for somebody specific to leave.

3. Ask which half the openings come from. BLS publishes exits and transfers separately in Table 1.10. High exits means a retirement wave and a seat that may be short of trainers. High transfers means a ladder — people are leaving because there's somewhere to go.

4. Stop treating a declining occupation as closed. An occupation can shrink and still hire thousands of people a year, because separations continue regardless. BLS notes that in declining occupations not all separations produce openings — but many still do.

The Scot Free Take

The whole board rests on this one methodological point, and the section above is the site auditing itself. I have spent months telling readers to check the denominator. This is what it looks like when you run that on your own column heading.

What gets me is that none of this is hidden. It's a definitions page on a government website, free, no login, and it says plainly that separations are the primary driver of openings. The entire career advice industry sorts by the other number anyway, because growth sounds like opportunity and "somebody quit" does not.

Somebody quit is the opportunity. Ninety-four percent of the time.

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Sources

BLS, Employment Projections, "Occupational openings and separations" fact sheet and "Employment Projections Data Definitions" — the openings equation; definitions of occupational separations, labor force exits, and occupational transfers; the note that not all separations produce openings in declining occupations.
BLS, "Occupational Separations" methodology documentation, last modified Aug. 28, 2025 — separations providing many more opportunities than growth in most occupations; the 2016–26 adoption of the separations method; the prior cohort-component replacement method used from 1991 through 2014–24; Federal Register solicitation.
BLS, Monthly Labor Review, "Occupational separations: a new method for projecting workforce needs" (2018) and "Occupational separations" (2019) — separations as the primary driver of job openings; the probit models behind exit and transfer rates.
BLS, Employment Projections 2025–2035, released Aug. 27, 2026, and Table 1.10 (occupational separations) — total employment growth of 5.0%; electrician openings of 72,700 annually, with approximately 7,590 from net growth, 22,100 from labor force exits, and 43,100 from occupational transfers; the ~93.7% replacement share.
Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, Minnesota Economic Trends, "New Separations Methodology and Its Impact on Occupational Employment Projections" — the 94%/6% split under the then-current cycle, and the explanation of what the old replacement methodology excluded.

A note on these sources: the 93.7% figure and the electrician separations breakdown come from a trade-school publication's calculation on BLS Table 1.10 rather than from a BLS summary table. The underlying series are federal and public; the division is theirs. The methodology statements, the definitions, and the openings equation are quoted from BLS documentation directly.

Scott Tower