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Geology actually has pretty excellent job prospects – certainly a great deal better than most sciences. I graduated in the midst of the recession with several great job offers with a BS in earth & ocean sciences. (Alas, my BA in classics gathered less interest.) I chose the graduate school route instead, however.</p>
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Despite the recent economic downturn, job prospects for geoscientists are excellent and are set to get even better. The latest data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that in 2018 there will be some 323,000 positions for geoscientists in the United States, about 23% more than in 2008. “If you have a degree, you’d have to be dead or dead lazy to not get a job,” says Christopher Keane, AGI’s director of technology and communications.</p>
<p>Yet there’s even more room for optimism, says Leila Gonzales, a workforce analyst with the AGI. The BLS data only project changes in the number of jobs, she notes. They don’t account for increased opportunities in the United States due to retirements, which will strike government, academia and the private sector alike during the next 10–15 years. This window of opportunity is the result of a collapse in commodity prices in the mid-1980s that was followed by a precipitous decline in geoscientists’ salaries, which in turn triggered a drop in academic enrolments. In the next decade or so, many of those graduates from the early 1980s will be nearing the ends of their careers, boosting job availability upon their retirement.</p>
<p>And the number of retirements could be substantial, says Gonzales. About 12% of today’s geoscientists are expected to retire by 2018, meaning that net job availability for geoscientists in the United States should have increased between 2008 and 2018 by around 35%, she says.</p>
<p>Demand for geoscientists is expected to rise worldwide, not just in the United States. Statistics compiled by the AGI for the International Union of Geological Sciences indicate that the three regions that produce the most geoscience graduates each year — the United States; Europe and Russia combined; and China — aren’t even meeting their own domestic needs, much less global requirements.</p>
<p>The number of geoscience degrees granted in the United States each year (about 1,060 master’s and 650 PhD degrees) has remained relatively stable for the past 15 years or more, says Gonzales. That steady, yet inadequate, pace of new entries into the field, paired with the wave of retirements during the next 10–15 years, almost guarantees that demand for skilled geoscientists can only increase.
Environ. Sci. Technol. 2010:
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects an overall 19% increase in all geoscience-related occupations between 2006 and 2016, which is 9% faster than the growth rate for all U.S. occupations. The highest growth rates in geoscience jobs will be in the management, scientific, and technical consulting (78%) which includes the majority of natural resource and hazard mitigation opportunities, waste management and remediation (37%), and finance and insurance (35%) sectors. Considering that a graduate degree is required for the majority of geoscience occupations, and that the number of geoscience graduate degrees conferred per year from U.S. institutions has averaged 1700 since 1995, the supply of new geoscience graduates to the workforce does not meet current demands, much less the projected increase in demand over the coming years.</p>
<p>Additionally, the aging geoscience workforce, with approximately 50% of geoscience professionals within 10−15 years of retirement, is cause for major concern within geoscience-employing industries.
Science:
“I can’t think of any unemployed hydrogeologists,” says Roy Haggerty, an associate professor of hydrogeology at Oregon State University, Corvallis. It’s easy to see why. Water is essential, irreplaceable, and, as populations and economies grow, increasingly in demand and endangered.</p>
<p>Environmental consulting companies, which employ about 80% of hydrogeologists in the United States, currently report four jobs for every qualified graduate, according to the American Geological Institute (AGI). Government regulatory agencies, national laboratories, and mining and oil companies also need them. New niches open regularly as hydrogeologists team up with scientists in other disciplines to grapple with huge environmental challenges, such as forecasting how changing climate will affect water resources and aquatic life. And signs are that the future will hold more of the same. As Richelle Allen-King, a hydrogeology professor at the University at Buffalo in New York, puts it, “Water problems are not going away.”
Science:
Geologist Amy Simonson loves her work. She spends her days in the countryside around Charlottesville, Virginia, measuring stream flow and groundwater levels for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. The job, she says, is exactly what she wanted.</p>
<p>Simonson, 25, began her job hunt in 2007 after getting a master’s degree in geology from the University of Delaware, Newark. She had one condition: She wanted to spend as much time as possible in the field, not in front of a microscope or a computer. Taking a scattershot approach, she applied for jobs in geophysics, engineering, environmental consulting, and geographic information system mapping. She didn’t have to wait long. “I got offered a lot of stuff,” she says.</p>
<p>Simonson’s experience isn’t rare. For many young geoscientists now embarking on careers, the job outlook is very good. The current federal research funding situation means it’s less rosy for those on an academic research track. But for those in industry, the number of geoscience jobs will grow by 22% from 2006 to 2016, much faster than the projected total of a 10% increase for all occupations, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.</p>
<p>“In general, the market is hot,” says Cindy Martinez, who analyzes geoscience workforce issues at the American Geological Institute (AGI) in Alexandria, Virginia. “Functionally, there’s no unemployment of geoscientists right now.”
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