The year's hottest jobs are hiring in droves, paying well, and providing room to grow


Telecommuting and flex-time privileges might have made the world of work more comfortable, but they've also made the lines between our work life and the rest of our life less visible. This isn't an open letter of complaint, however. The truth is that we're a society that lives, andloves, to work.
So it's important to be a society that loves the work it does.
Each year, U.S. News compiles a list of the Best Careers based on the Labor Department's employment projections. And this year, we continue to base our picks for the Best Jobs of 2012 on professions that should hire abundantly over the next several years. To better help you make a smart career choice, we've also started ranking our selections.
[See The Best 25 Jobs of 2012 Rankings.]
Jobs from quick-to-hire industries made our list: business, creative services, healthcare, science & technology, and social services. John Challenger, CEO of the outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas predicts many of these sectors will overlap, with one industry standing the tallest. "Healthcare has become the core industry in this country, just like manufacturing in another era," he says. "It's a confluence of forces causing this, including the science involved in uncovering new frontiers, the aging of the population, and government's commitment to providing healthcare to a broader generation of people. That causes job growth in several sectors."
Growth might be one of the reasons to interview for one of these positions, but our rankings give you some context as to why you'd want to stick around. We use a formula that compares projected growth for the future to employment rates of the present. We then weigh in average salaries from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and job satisfaction, as determined by the job review website Glassdoor. According to company spokeswoman Samantha...