Job Odds — What Job Am I Likely to Get?
This is a question that a lot of job seekers are likely to ask themselves. The answer is obviously hyper-specific to everyone’s individual situation, but I have lots of aggregate resume data at ZipRecruiter that I can look through to see if I can get a sense for population trends. That’s a far cry from a personalized recommendation, but I’ll see how far I can get. I’ll be using a random anonymized sampling of recently uploaded resumes.
Most people define themselves by their current job title. In my mental model, there’s a certain likelihood of getting every other job title, given what title you have currently. Defining the odds as “% of people who held your title that then moved on to another title” seems like a pretty good model.
Business Analysts
Let’s look at the next job title following Business Analyst on people’s resumes:
Yikes, pretty granular. 54% of Business Analysts take unique job titles in their next role, where they are the only people that have that title within this sample. That’s not super helpful. As you might expect, Business Analyst and Senior Business Analyst are pretty common follow-ups, and together make up 25% of the next job titles.
I think we need to do some bucketing to make this more useful. I picked Business Analyst because I have some domain knowledge in the area, so I have a sense for what keywords are important markers for similar jobs. A couple below, with my purely subjective sense of categorization:
- Business: Operational “people” problems
- Data: Statistical analyses
- Financial: Forecasting and budgeting
- Product: Behavioral analysis of product usage
- Systems: IT and Support work
Using some simple “keyword match” bucketing, let’s see how much we can dig into the Other bucket.
Not bad! There’s still a group of about 20% of titles that I couldn’t put into nice buckets, but now we have a clearer picture of what’s going on.
If I were talking to a person currently employed as a Business Analyst, they’d probably already figure they have a pretty good shot of getting a job in a similar “Business” category role. They might not realize the strong overlap with IT, Project Management, or Consulting, however. As you get further down, however, I might caution them that jumping from a generic Business Analyst role into a more specialized Finance/Sales/Marketing role can happen, but it’s certainly less common, <5% of the time. So if they’re looking to move to Finance, I’d advise they bolster their resume by chipping in as much as possible on Finance projects within their current company. That way, those lower odds would be offset by their more specific experience.
Registered Nurses
I started with Business Analyst because I know what it’s like to be one. Let’s try that same exercise, but with something I’m completely inexperienced with, like Registered Nurse. I’ve bucketed RN+Registered Nurse together already, because I believe they’re synonymous.
Well that’s different! While 56% of RNs go on to unique next titles, a much larger percent of them stick with exactly RN next, 32%. I suppose that’s a reflection of specialization, the more specialized your education and licensing to get a particular job, the more likely you are to continue on in that exact same job.
I’ll take a crack at keyword bucketing these titles as well, to see if there’s any aggregate differences between fields that I can suss out.
I went through and found a few keywords that seemed to pop up often, and similar to Business Analyst, was able to categorize about 80% of the titles. Of those categorized, RN makes up an even bigger chunk now, as I found lots of little -RN and RN- strings hiding in long job titles. By this estimate, about 56% of RNs go on to a next job title that also includes RN or similar.
If I were to attempt to give some advice to a Registered Nurse job seeker, even though I am far from an industry expert, I’d say that further specialization seems to be a good way to move on. Nurse Practicioner, Clinical Nurse Specialist, and other designations seem to have bumps in pay, but I’d caution the odds aren’t great. <10% of RNs move to NPs, and <5% move directly to CNSs. If Nursing specifically isn’t their interest, there are a couple related fields that might work well. Management and Administration, Case Management, and Teaching add up to nearly 20% of further titles held by Registered nurses.
After diving into these 2 specific titles to see where they might lead someone down a career path, I’m struck by the similar 80/20 split of “categorizable” jobs versus unique ones. This may describe a general principle of job seeking that people apply:
- 80% of the time, try to get a job in your field
- 20% of the time, go your own way
Within these samples, I saw Nurses that became Accountants, and Business Analysts that became Post Office workers. It’s nice to think that people from all walks of life can go on to do all kinds of jobs.
The way I see it, odds are defined by what other people have done and are doing in the world. This isn’t an objective prediction of likelihood, it’s a descriptive measurement of what’s happening right now. It can naturally change as people’s perceptions and behaviors change.
I’m starting from the assumption that everyone will get another job at some point in their life, but the time frame is variable. More people like yourself (with the same title) that get a particular job tells you that the odds are better, or that the time frame is shorter. So in that model, Business Analysts are ~4x as likely to get Business jobs as those that switch to Project Management. Put another way, if you want to switch from Business Analyst to Project Management, it might take you 4x as long, but it still has a reasonable chance of happening.
Using the same model, Registered Nurses have 6x the odds of getting another Registered Nurse job as they do switching to Nurse Practitioner. Or much more likely, it simply takes 6x as long to get Nursing Practitioner jobs, as they require more education and certification.
We’re working on lots of things like this at ZipRecruiter, that try to not only make it easier to search and apply for jobs, but also get smarter about how to help job seekers find the right jobs to apply to. It’s really tough stuff, but hopefully we’ll be able to get closer to that personalized recommendation for everyone.
