Headline: BLS’s 2025–35 projections show the fastest-growing occupations are almost all skills taught in CTE labs — which turns the real question from “is there demand?” to “will our program mix match it?”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics published its 2025–35 employment projections on September 16, 2026, and the headline is not a surprise — it is a decision prompt. The occupations projected to grow fastest over the next decade are, almost without exception, the exact skills that career and technical education programs are built to teach. Healthcare support roles are projected to grow 13.3%, and healthcare practitioners and technical roles another 8.0%, together accounting for roughly one-third of all new jobs through 2035. That concentration changes the planning math for anyone who decides which CTE pathways to fund, staff, and equip this budget cycle.
The demand signal is specific, not vague
The fastest-growing individual occupations read like a CTE course catalog. Nurse practitioners lead at 41% projected growth, followed by solar photovoltaic installers at 36.5%, wind turbine technicians, data scientists at 35%, and occupational therapy assistants at 21.5%. On the highest-openings side — the jobs that will need the most warm bodies regardless of percentage growth — electricians are projected to add 75,900 openings, construction laborers 109,300, software developers 174,700, and substance-abuse and mental-health counselors 98,000.
The Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) flagged the same pattern in its own September 16 analysis, noting that CTE-related occupations rank on both the fastest-growing and the highest-openings lists. Industrial machinery mechanics, a mainstay of manufacturing pathways, are projected to grow 18%. The utilities industry is projected to grow faster than any other — 9.8% — while private healthcare and social assistance are projected to add more total jobs than any other sector.
The data also names what is shrinking. Retail trade is projected to lose jobs, and federal government employment is projected to decline 3.4%. Those are two of the sectors a program portfolio should think twice about doubling down on.
One distinction in the BLS tables deserves a planner’s attention: fastest-growing and highest-openings are not the same list. An occupation can grow rapidly from a small base — solar photovoltaic installers, at 36.5%, are adding fast but from a modest headcount — while an occupation like construction laborers, growing more slowly by percentage, still produces 109,300 openings because the existing workforce is large and turning over. For a district choosing where to place a pathway, both numbers matter. A small, fast-growing field can absorb a program’s graduates without saturating, while a high-openings field guarantees steady placement but may already have an established training pipeline. The right portfolio holds both kinds.
What this means for program planning
For a CTE director in Philadelphia, this is not an abstract federal report. It is the clearest available map of where to point Perkins funds, equipment purchases, and instructor hires. The School District of Philadelphia’s career and technical education programs, like CTE programs statewide, are required to align curriculum to Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) standards and to documented labor-market demand under Perkins V — and this BLS release is the most authoritative single demand document a planner can cite in a local Perkins application.
The implication worth stating plainly: a program mix aligned to healthcare, clean energy, utilities, construction, and IT is a program mix that sends graduates toward sectors with documented, decade-long demand. A mix still weighted toward flat or declining retail and administrative pathways risks training students for jobs that are contracting at the same time their first cohort enters the workforce.
This is where the BLS data and Philadelphia’s labor market intersect in practice. PA CareerLink and Philadelphia Works, the city’s workforce development board, already route job-seekers and training dollars toward in-demand occupations using state and federal projections. CTE programs that read the same projections can position themselves to receive those training referrals, employer-partnership interest, and work-based-learning placements — because they are teaching into the exact roles employers are struggling to fill.
The good, the bad, what’s best?
The good: the growth is in fields that are durable, credential-backed, and difficult to offshore — healthcare support, skilled trades, and energy infrastructure. A student who completes a solar-installation or nursing-support pathway is walking into a documented shortage, not a speculative one.
The bad: demand signals do not build themselves. Projections are not enrollments, and a program cannot stand up a wind-turbine or solar-array pathway on the strength of a BLS table alone. Equipment, certified instructors, employer partners, and clinical or worksite agreements all have to be assembled — and the fastest-growing fields are often the ones with the steepest startup cost and the most specialized instructor requirements.
What’s best: treat the projections as a prioritization tool, not a wholesale pivot. The smartest move for most districts is to align incremental capacity — one new or expanded healthcare, construction, energy, or IT pathway at a time — to the demand curve, while letting existing strong programs graduate out students rather than cutting them mid-cohort.
What’s next
The immediate next step for a CTE administrator is to read this release against their own program roster and ask a concrete question: which of our current pathways are pointed at the sectors BLS says are growing, and which are pointed at retail trade or a shrinking federal footprint? The answer to that question is the raw material for next year’s Perkins plan, the equipment budget, and the conversation with employers about where work-based learning should concentrate.
✅ Recommendation: Use the BLS 2025–35 projections — alongside the ACTE analysis — as the demand anchor for this year’s program-expansion decisions. Prioritize healthcare support, clean energy and utilities, construction, and IT/computer occupations, and require that any new pathway investment name the BLS growth data and the local employer demand it responds to before it is funded.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Total employment projected to grow 3.5 percent between 2025 and 2035,” Economics Daily, September 2026 — https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/total-employment-projected-to-grow-3-5-percent-between-2025-and-2035.htm
