For Read Across America Day: Occupations for those with writing and reading skills

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss! Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, was born March 2, 1904, and spent a lifetime providing children, and their parents, with reasons to read. One of his best-known literary characters could even read with his eyes shut. BLS has data on skills required in various occupations, including writing and reading skills (though BLS has no data on writing and reading with eyes shut as opposed to writing and reading with eyes open).

Among the occupations with the highest writing and reading scores, epidemiologists is the occupation with the largest projected percentage increase in employment. Employment of epidemiologists, public health workers who investigate patterns and causes of disease and injury, is projected to increase 18.8 percent from 2023 to 2033. Employment of clinical and counseling psychologists is projected to increase 13.3 percent over the projections decade.

In terms of the number of jobs, the number of lawyers is projected to increase by about 44,000 from 2023 to 2033. This is more than the combined increase of all the other occupations with the highest writing and reading scores. With employment of 859,000 in 2023, lawyers was the occupation with the largest employment among the group of occupations with highly skilled writers and readers.

Even though fast growth over the projections period is projected for some, about half of these occupations are only expected to add fewer than 1,000 new jobs to the economy because they are smaller occupations. These include anthropologists and archeologists, industrial-organizational psychologists, historians, and postsecondary forestry and conservation science teachers.

Editors, who review and revise content for publication, are expected to see their employment decrease by about 2,300, or 2.0 percent, over the projections period.

Median annual wages in 2023 were over $100,000 for 9 of these 21 occupations employing highly skilled writers and readers. Wages for this group ranged from $57,490 for judicial law clerks to over $220,000 for family medicine physicians, radiologists, and emergency medicine physicians.

As we observe Read Across America Day, perhaps by treating ourselves to some time with a good book or magazine, or even reading more on the BLS website (see links below), we might remember these words from Dr. Seuss: "The more that you read, the more things you will know; the more that you learn, the more places you’ll go," to which we might add (with apologies to Dr. Seuss), "if writing and reading, are among your top skills, you might get a good job, that will pay all your bills; learn medicine, or law, or even heuristics; but start with a look, at these labor statistics."

This TED focuses on occupations for which the importance of writing and reading skills is at the 98th percentile or higher. The skills data and the 2023–33 employment projections are from the Employment Projections program. Skills scores for some occupations were imputed from similar occupations. For more information, see “A new data product for occupational skills: methodology, analysis, and a guide to using the employment projections skills data.” The wage estimates are from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. Learn more about the occupations in this article and hundreds of others in the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH). The OOH describes what workers do, where they work, their wages, job outlook, and more.