COLUMBUS, Ohio, October 31, 2018 – Heating, Air-conditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International (HARDI) has announced Michael Wolf, chief of the Division of Occupational Employment Projections at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), as having a feature in HARDI's upcoming workforce recruitment documentary.
"Overall, we're seeing that the average growth of an occupation over the next 10 years is about seven percent," Wolf states in his interview. "For HVAC, it's actually 15 percent, so about twice as fast as the average. This is a field that's in demand and a good opportunity for people to enter."
The Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program at BLS produces employment and wage estimates annually for more than 800 occupations. These estimates are available for the nation as a whole, for individual states and for metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas; national occupational estimates for specific industries are also available. The most recent OES report, which includes information on the HVAC industry, was completed in 2017.
"The new jobs are important to understand how the workforce is changing and what those structural changes are, but for a lot of occupations, you actually get more openings just to replace the existing workers who might be leaving that occupation," Wolf continues. "For HVAC, we actually find that there are about, on average, 38,700 openings per year for people to enter that occupation. That's our 10-year projection period, so that's a lot of opportunities for people to enter the field, and a lot of new workers that are needed."
The HARDI documentary project is expected to complete in December. A promotional trailer will be released in November.