Need a Job? Where to Look Right Now

Dec. 9, 2009 — -- The world needs ditch diggers, as any miserable old curmudgeon can tell you. And, as it turns out, the American job market needs lab technicians, and database managers, too.

These are just some of the more promising career paths according to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report compiled by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. (BLS)

Two sectors, Professional and Business Services, as well as Education and Health Care, had the highest rates of available job openings among the nine categories tracked by the BLS in October, the most recent month covered by the just released JOLTS report.

Recently released BLS statistics confirmed that those two areas added jobs in November.

"Based on these two pieces of data, one could make a case that professional and business services, and health care and education are the two sectors holding the most job opportunities presently," noted John Wohlford, a BLS economist who heads up the JOLTS research.

Overall, the job openings rate was unchanged in October at 1.9 percent, meaning that for every possible job available, 1.9 percent of them remained unfilled as of Oct. 31.

After falling steeply from mid-2007 through February 2009, the job openings rate has been holding steady since March 2009. The absolute number of job openings fell by 2.3 million from the most recent peak period (June 2007 to April 2009), but since then it has declined by only 7,000.

Openings have been tracked by BLS since 2000 when there were 5 million unfilled openings. Currently, there are only 2.5 million openings. Meanwhile, 15.7 million Americans are unemployed.

The two industries with the highest rates of unfilled openings, Professional and Business Services and Health Care and Education, both carried rates of 2.7 percent. The industry with the lowest rate of unfilled opening was construction, which was an industry seen as supposedly benefiting the most from stimulus spending. Looking within the high opportunity sectors and beyond, ABC News tried to identify five areas of employment for job seekers to zero in on, whether you are just out of college, attempting to reinvent yourself or just plain desperate: