U.S. Geoscience Employment Shrinks 9% During 2019

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Date updated: 2020-04-22
Data Brief 2020-004
Written and compiled by Christopher Keane and Leila Gonzales, AGI, April 2020

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According to the U.S. Census Bureau, total U.S. geoscience employment was 278,945 at the end of 2019, down from 306,816 at the start of the year. For occupations in the solid-earth geosciences, employment over the same period shrunk 7.5% to 216,556.

Several geoscience occupations, primarily engineering and managerial positions, are reported more rapidly than all geoscience occupations. For these early reporting geoscience occupations, total employment was 115,784 for March 2020, which is a 20% increase over March 2019, but a 7% decline since the start of 2020.

Geoscience employment shows strong seasonality cycles. These reported numbers are not seasonally adjusted and the non-adjusted data for early reporting occupations do not show statistically significant predictive power for all geoscience or solid-earth geoscience employment. In the next report, AGI expects to be able to report these trends accommodating for seasonality to give a better sense of the structural employment trend in the geosciences.

Data Brief 2020-004 chart 01: U.S. Geoscience Employment (2019-2020) (credit: AGI; data derived from the Current Population Survey)

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