Accounting is One of the Best Flexible Roles in 2024 - And Pays Well

By Michael Grothaus, Fast Company (TNS)

If you’re looking for a new job in 2024—especially one with a higher-than-average salary and some chance of remote work—you’ll want to give Indeed’s 50 Best Jobs in the U.S. for 2024 list a look.

The jobs site tracks the best jobs in America annually, but this year’s list was compiled in a slightly different way. As Indeed points out, a recent Forrester study shows that those seeking jobs name “fair pay” as the primary factor that influences their well-being in the workplace, with the flexibility of the job a close second.

That’s why for its 2024 Best Jobs list, Indeed partly selected the jobs based on a salary minimum above the national average in America and jobs for which at least 10% of the listings included flexible terms like “remote” or “hybrid” work. The jobs platform also took into account opportunity growth of the job and availability of the jobs in consideration.

These are the top 10 jobs in America, based on Indeed’s criteria, followed by their starting salary:

Mental health technician: $77,448
Loan officer: $192,339
Mental health therapist: $76,140
Electrical engineer: $102,590
Construction project manager: $103,431
Mechanical engineer: $96,091
Psychiatrist: $258,440
Human resources manager: $79,174
Senior accountant: $82,811
Data engineer: $130,135

Looking at the top 10 list, you can see two types of jobs dominate: those in the mental health field and engineering positions. Indeed points to a Mental Health America report that shows 20.78% of adult Americans have admitted to struggling with mental health issues in 2023. Those struggles have led to an increased need for people working in the mental health field.

Another finding from Indeed’s list is that 70% of the top 10 jobs have a high probability of being impacted by AI. Yet that doesn’t mean AI itself may take your job. “In reality, it isn’t generative AI that is going to take your job,” said Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Indeed, but rather the person who “knows how to work with the tools that generative AI has given them.”

But tech jobs no longer dominate Indeed’s top 50 list, either—and part of that is because tech jobs are no longer seeing the exponential growth they did during the pandemic years. Instead, layoffs hit the tech industry hard in 2023, a trend that has crept into 2024 so far as well.

You can check out Indeed’s full list here. Jobs are ranked by the number of job postings per one million total postings.

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