Opportunity Occupations Monitor

The Opportunity Occupations Monitor is an interactive web-based tool that workers can use to determine the prevalence of “opportunity employment”—jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree and pay more than the national median wage—in specific labor markets across the country. Hosted on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, a member of the Rework America Alliance, the monitor allows users to choose one or more U.S. metro areas and then displays the percentages of low-wage employment, opportunity employment, and higher-wage jobs requiring bachelor’s degrees in the selected areas year by year from 2012 to 2021.

The monitor features a color-coded U.S. map with shades of blue indicating the proportion of opportunity employment in each metro area. The darker the shade of blue, the higher the prevalence of jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree and pay more than the national median wage.  

The monitor also lists the industries and occupations that are most prevalent within a regional economy, the share of jobs that are accessible to workers without a bachelor’s degree, and 10-year projections of increases or decreases in the number of jobs in each category.

The monitor’s calculations of the national median wage are based on estimates from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The U.S. median wage was $45,760 in 2021, the most recent year for which the monitor has data.