The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes relatively few documents aimed directly at the general public rather than at labor economists, but its Spring 2014 Occupational Outlook Quarterly article, "STEM 101: Intro to Tomorrow's Jobs" by BLS economist Dennis Vilorio, is one of them. It is a useful document precisely because it is not a press release or an advocacy piece — it is a government economist's straightforward walk through what the official occupational-employment projection data actually says about STEM work, without the amplification that surrounds many STEM-jobs headlines. It is worth reading closely, and worth separating what the report actually establishes from what gets claimed about it in less careful secondhand summaries.
What "STEM Occupations" Means in the BLS Data
One of the more useful contributions of the report is methodological: it is explicit about which occupations count as "STEM" for purposes of the projection, drawing on a list developed by a committee spanning several federal statistical agencies rather than an informal or marketing-driven definition. The report examines close to 100 distinct occupations across four broad clusters — life and physical sciences, computer and mathematical occupations, engineering and engineering technicians, and STEM-related management and postsecondary teaching roles. This matters because "STEM jobs" headlines in less careful reporting sometimes use inconsistent or expansive definitions that inflate the apparent size of the STEM workforce; the BLS classification is comparatively conservative and consistently applied, which makes its projections more useful for actual career planning than looser popular usage of the term.
The Headline Projection
The report's central number is a projection that STEM employment will grow to more than 9 million jobs between 2012 and 2022 — an increase of approximately 1 million jobs over 2012 employment levels across the occupations the BLS classification counts as STEM. This is a ten-year projection, built from the BLS's regular occupational employment projections program, which uses economic and demographic modeling rather than survey-based sentiment about hiring intentions. It is, in other words, a structural projection about where the economy's occupational mix is headed, not a short-term hiring forecast.
It is worth being precise about what this number does and does not say. A roughly 1-million-job increase over a decade, while genuinely faster growth than the economy-wide average, is not the same as the much larger and less carefully sourced STEM-shortage figures that circulate in some policy and industry advocacy contexts — figures that sometimes conflate STEM-adjacent roles, count differently, or extrapolate more aggressively than the BLS's methodology supports. The BLS report's virtue is precisely that it is more conservative and more methodologically transparent than many of the numbers competing for attention in the STEM-jobs conversation.
Which STEM Fields Are Actually Driving the Growth
The report's occupation-level detail is more useful for individual career planning than the aggregate headline. Computer and mathematical occupations show among the fastest projected growth rates and the largest absolute numbers of projected job openings within the STEM classification — a pattern consistent with the broader expansion of software, data infrastructure, and computing roles across industries well beyond the technology sector itself. Engineering occupations show solid but more variable growth depending on the specific discipline, with some engineering fields (notably those tied to energy and infrastructure) showing stronger projected demand than others. Life and physical science occupations show more modest aggregate growth, concentrated in specific sub-fields rather than evenly distributed.
This occupation-level unevenness is the single most actionable finding in the report for someone actually planning a STEM career path: "STEM" as an aggregate category obscures enormous variation in growth prospects between, say, a biomedical engineer and a physical scientist in a field with flat federal research funding. Choosing a STEM field based on the aggregate growth headline rather than the occupation-specific detail risks missing exactly the variation that determines whether a specific credential leads to a strong job market or a difficult one.
Wages and the STEM Wage Premium
The report also documents that STEM occupations, in aggregate, command a wage premium over non-STEM occupations requiring comparable levels of education — a finding broadly consistent with other federal and academic labor-market research on STEM compensation. This premium is not uniform across the STEM occupations the report covers, and it interacts with the same field-level variation noted above: the wage premium is generally larger in computing and engineering occupations than in some life-science roles, particularly at the bachelor's degree level before controlling for years of postgraduate training.
What the Report Does Not Address
Being precise about a report's scope means being precise about its limits. The BLS projection is a national aggregate; it does not provide regional or metro-area detail, which matters enormously for actual job seekers, since STEM hiring is geographically concentrated in ways the national number does not capture. It also does not disaggregate its projections by gender, race, or other demographic categories — for that data, the more relevant source remains the National Science Foundation's biennial report on women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in science and engineering, which tracks representation within these same occupational categories over time, separately from the BLS's employment-growth projections.
The report is also, necessarily, a projection rather than a guarantee. BLS occupational projections are revised periodically as new data becomes available, and the ten-year horizon from a 2012 base year to a 2022 target means the underlying economic assumptions could be affected by developments — economic downturns, major policy shifts, technological disruption — that were not fully visible when the projection was modeled. It should be read as the best available structural estimate given information as of the report's publication, not as a certainty.
How This Compares to Employer-Reported STEM Shortage Claims
The BLS report's relatively measured growth projection is worth reading alongside the louder "STEM shortage" claims that circulate frequently in industry and policy advocacy contexts, some of which describe gaps in the hundreds of thousands or low millions of unfilled STEM positions. The discrepancy between these figures and the BLS's roughly 1-million-job decade-long growth estimate is not primarily a disagreement about facts so much as a difference in what is being measured and how expansively "STEM" and "shortage" are defined. Some industry estimates count STEM-adjacent roles the federal classification excludes; others measure job postings that go unfilled for a period of time (which reflects hiring friction and specific-skill mismatches at particular firms) rather than a genuine aggregate absence of qualified workers nationally.
This distinction matters for career planning: the BLS data supports confidence that STEM employment overall will keep growing faster than the broader economy, particularly in computing fields, but it does not support the strongest versions of shortage claims that sometimes appear in press coverage or industry lobbying material aimed at expanding visa programs or STEM education funding. A careful reader evaluating any STEM-jobs claim should ask which occupational classification is being used, what time horizon is being described, and whether "shortage" refers to a national aggregate gap or a localized, employer-specific hiring difficulty — three questions the BLS report itself answers with unusual transparency relative to many of the figures competing for attention around it.
What Local and Regional Job Seekers Should Keep in Mind
Because the BLS projection is a national aggregate, individuals evaluating specific STEM career decisions should treat it as a useful directional signal rather than a substitute for research into their specific target region and industry. STEM hiring, and computing hiring in particular, remains geographically concentrated around specific metro areas and industry clusters, and a national growth figure can mask substantial variation between a region with a strong local technology or advanced-manufacturing employer base and a region without one. State-level labor market information offices, which most states maintain alongside their unemployment insurance systems, generally publish more granular regional occupational projections that complement the BLS national figures and are worth consulting directly for anyone planning a STEM career path tied to a specific geography.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the BLS "STEM 101" report?
"STEM 101: Intro to Tomorrow's Jobs" is a Spring 2014 Occupational Outlook Quarterly article by BLS economist Dennis Vilorio, examining close to 100 occupations classified as STEM by a federal interagency committee and projecting their employment growth from 2012 to 2022.
How many STEM jobs does the report project by 2022?
The report projects STEM employment growing to more than 9 million jobs by 2022, an increase of approximately 1 million jobs over 2012 levels — a national, structural projection rather than a short-term hiring forecast.
Which STEM fields does the report show growing fastest?
Computer and mathematical occupations show among the fastest projected growth and the largest absolute number of openings within the STEM classification. Engineering growth varies more by specific discipline, and life and physical science occupations show more modest aggregate growth concentrated in particular sub-fields.
Does the BLS report include demographic breakdowns by gender or race?
No. The report focuses on aggregate national employment projections by occupation. For demographic representation data within STEM fields, the National Science Foundation's biennial report on women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in science and engineering is the more relevant federal source.
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