Wisconsin’s job market hit a record high in 2025 — 3,058,500 total jobs as of July, with a median wage that reached a new peak of $25.01 per hour, according to the High Road Strategy Center’s State of Working Wisconsin 2025 report. That’s a genuinely positive headline. But record totals and averages don’t tell every worker what they actually need to know: which industries are growing, which pay enough to support a family, and where the job security is real rather than temporary. Wisconsin’s labor market is not moving uniformly — some sectors are expanding rapidly, some are holding steady, and some are contracting. For anyone making a career decision, a job change, or an investment in education or retraining right now, understanding where Wisconsin’s economy is actually headed is worth far more than a statewide average.
📋 What Wisconsin Workers Need to Know
- Healthcare is Wisconsin’s most consistently growing major sector — driven by an aging population and structural demand that doesn’t slow in recessions — and it spans entry-level through highly compensated professional roles.
- Technology and data-related occupations are among the fastest-growing by percentage in Wisconsin, with computer and mathematical roles projected to expand significantly through 2032 by the state’s Department of Workforce Development.
- Skilled trades — construction, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and industrial maintenance — face chronic worker shortages in Wisconsin and offer strong wages, often without requiring a four-year degree.
- Wisconsin’s record total employment of 3,058,500 jobs masks important variation: job growth in 2025 has been slow overall, averaging just 1,400 jobs per month, which makes sector selection more important than ever for workers planning ahead.
- The industries with the most job openings are not always the ones with the best wages — understanding the distinction between high-turnover, lower-wage sectors and genuinely growing high-quality career fields is essential for informed decision-making.
Healthcare: The Best Industry to Work in Wisconsin Right Now
No sector in Wisconsin combines growth, volume, geographic reach, and career ladder depth the way healthcare does. The numbers make this case plainly. Wisconsin Watch’s September 2025 analysis of state and federal workforce projections found that nurse practitioners are among the fastest-growing occupations in Wisconsin — projected to grow by 51% from 2022 to 2032, adding 2,530 positions. Physician assistants are on a similar trajectory. Data scientists and healthcare support roles are both expanding. And the Wisconsin Hospital Association’s 2025 Workforce Report documents that Wisconsin hospital employment has grown 8% since 2019 — and is still not keeping pace with demand, leaving meaningful vacancy rates across clinical and support roles.
The underlying driver of healthcare’s strength in Wisconsin is demographic and structural: the state’s population is aging rapidly, the number of residents over 65 is expected to nearly double by 2040, and older adults consume significantly more healthcare than younger ones. That demand doesn’t respond to economic cycles the way retail or hospitality do. Healthcare hiring continued through every downturn of the past two decades, and nationally, healthcare led all industries in job additions in the period leading into 2025, averaging 59,000 new jobs per month across the country according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by the Wisconsin Hospital Association.
The healthcare sector also spans an unusually wide compensation range, which matters for workers at different stages of their careers. Home health and personal care aides — Wisconsin’s most common occupation, according to state projections — provide essential care but carry median wages under $35,000. Registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and surgical technologists sit in the middle of the range. Nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and healthcare administrators earn well above the state median. This breadth means that healthcare offers genuine career pathways — not just jobs — for workers entering at multiple levels of education and training, with meaningful wages available at each step.
Home Care and Direct Support: The Hidden Healthcare Workforce Crisis
Within healthcare’s overall growth story, one segment deserves specific attention: home health and personal care aides. This is Wisconsin’s single most common occupation by projected openings — the state projects 14,150 annual openings in this category. But many of those openings reflect turnover, not net growth. The work is essential and the demand is genuinely growing — but wages have been persistently low, funded largely through Medicaid reimbursement rates that haven’t kept pace with market wages in other entry-level fields. The result is a sector that desperately needs workers and struggles to retain them, contributing to a care gap that affects Wisconsin’s most vulnerable residents. This is as much a policy failure as a labor market condition — and it is directly addressable through state decisions about Medicaid reimbursement rates.
Technology and Data: Fast Growth for Wisconsin’s Skilled Workforce
Wisconsin is not Silicon Valley, but it is developing a meaningful and growing technology employment base — in Madison’s professional services corridor, in Milwaukee’s expanding innovation economy, and in the data infrastructure projects now landing in southeast Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development’s employment projections identify computer and mathematical occupations as among the fastest-growing occupational groups in the state. Wisconsin Watch’s workforce analysis put specific numbers on this: computer and information research scientists are projected to grow 44% in Wisconsin from 2022 to 2032, and data scientists are projected to grow 43% — adding 1,230 positions over that period.
The wages in this sector are among the highest available in the state. Six of the top ten fastest-growing occupations in Wisconsin carry median salaries of $85,000 or more, according to the same Wisconsin Watch analysis. For workers with the right technical training, technology represents one of the clearest pathways to well above median wages in the current Wisconsin economy.
The tech sector’s growth in Wisconsin is being accelerated by major private investment. Southeast Wisconsin, particularly Racine County, has attracted a Microsoft data center investment totaling over $7 billion across two phases — a project that will create hundreds of jobs directly and drive broader demand for technical talent throughout the region. LinkedIn ranked the Milwaukee metro among the fastest-growing U.S. metros for jobs in 2025. These aren’t speculative projections — they are capital commitments already underway that will shape regional hiring demand for years.
Skilled Trades: High Wages, Chronic Shortages, and No Four-Year Degree Required
If there is one sector where the gap between available jobs and available workers is most acute in Wisconsin right now, it is skilled trades. Electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, welders, construction managers, and industrial maintenance workers are in persistent high demand across the state — in residential and commercial construction, in manufacturing, in infrastructure projects, and in the energy sector. The chronic shortage of skilled tradespeople in Wisconsin has been building for two decades, driven by retirement waves among the existing workforce, insufficient pipeline replacement through vocational training programs, and a cultural drift in education policy that steered young people toward four-year degrees and away from trades certifications.
The compensation available in skilled trades has corrected significantly in response to that scarcity. Experienced electricians, plumbers, and construction project managers in Wisconsin routinely earn above the state median wage, and those in specialty or supervisory roles can earn considerably more. The entry point — a technical college program, an apprenticeship, or both — typically requires two years or less and costs a fraction of a four-year degree, meaning that skilled tradespeople can begin building genuine career earnings earlier and without the student debt load that accompanies many professional paths. Wisconsin’s Wisconsin Technical College System operates 16 institutions statewide that provide direct pipelines into these fields through programs in construction, manufacturing technology, electrical systems, and related disciplines.
The energy transition is adding a new dimension to trades employment in Wisconsin. Wind turbine service technicians are the single fastest-growing occupation in Wisconsin by percentage, projected to grow 75% from 2022 to 2032, according to Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development projections. Solar installation and energy efficiency retrofitting are also growing fields for workers with electrical and construction backgrounds. Federal policy uncertainty around renewable energy creates some caution in this specific sub-sector, but the broader skilled trades demand — driven by housing construction, infrastructure investment, and industrial maintenance — is not going away.
Leisure, Hospitality, and Tourism: Recovery, Growth, and Honest Caveats
Wisconsin’s leisure and hospitality sector experienced a devastating collapse during the COVID-19 pandemic and has been in sustained recovery since. The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development’s 2023-2025 projections identified leisure and hospitality as the fastest-growing sector in absolute job terms for that period, adding an estimated 15,342 jobs — a 5.25% expansion. The state’s tourism economy is real and significant: roughly one in 21 Wisconsin jobs is connected to tourism in some form.
The honest caveat is that this sector, while growing, is also characterized by the employment qualities that make career planning hardest: lower median wages, higher turnover, seasonality in many markets, and limited upward mobility for most front-line roles. It is a sector that provides genuine employment for hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites and is worth counting as a genuine part of the state’s economic strength. But workers making long-term career decisions should understand the distinction between an industry that is growing and an industry that provides the wages, benefits, and stability that constitute a family-sustaining career path. For hospitality workers seeking advancement, management and culinary training programs at Wisconsin technical colleges and UW campuses offer structured pathways into higher-compensation roles within the industry.
Manufacturing: Wisconsin’s Cornerstone Industry in Transition
Manufacturing is the historical backbone of Wisconsin’s economy and remains one of its largest employment sectors. Wisconsin is still one of the most manufacturing-intensive states in the country relative to its population, with a diverse industrial base spanning food processing, paper products, industrial machinery, transportation equipment, and medical devices. That diversity has historically insulated Wisconsin’s manufacturing sector from the kind of catastrophic single-industry collapse that devastated more specialized manufacturing regions elsewhere.
The current picture is more mixed. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue’s November 2025 Economic Forecast projected that manufacturing was expected to lose jobs in 2025 and over the following several years — a sobering near-term outlook for a sector that still employs a large share of Wisconsin’s workforce. Automation, evolving global supply chains, and tariff-related uncertainty are all contributing to that contraction. However, advanced manufacturing — precision machining, robotics, semiconductor-adjacent manufacturing, and food science — continues to recruit for skilled positions that pay well above average. The transition from traditional to advanced manufacturing creates genuine opportunity for workers with the right technical training, even as the overall headcount in the sector contracts.
What These Industries Tell Us About Wisconsin’s Economic Future
Read together, the data on Wisconsin’s best industries points toward a clear and important conclusion: the jobs that are growing fastest and paying best in Wisconsin increasingly require either specialized clinical training (healthcare), technical and analytical skills (technology), or hands-on craft expertise developed through apprenticeship and vocational programs (skilled trades). The implication for policy — and for the workers trying to navigate these decisions — is that Wisconsin needs robust, accessible, and well-funded pathways into all three of these domains, not just for recent graduates but for mid-career workers, for workers displaced from contracting industries, and for people who couldn’t access those pathways earlier in their lives.
That means adequately funded technical colleges. It means apprenticeship programs that are available across the state’s regions, not just in metro areas. It means Medicaid reimbursement rates in home care that make direct support work pay enough to retain the workforce Wisconsin’s aging population will require. And it means a technology policy environment that actively courts investment like the Microsoft data center project while building the local talent pipeline to ensure that the jobs those investments create go to Wisconsinites, not exclusively to workers recruited from outside the state.
David Crowley and the Economy That Works for Wisconsin Workers
Wisconsin reaching record employment is worth acknowledging — but a record headline doesn’t automatically translate into economic security for the workers driving that number. As the State of Working Wisconsin 2025 report documents, job growth has slowed, inequality by race and geography persists, union coverage has declined, and hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin workers are employed in sectors where wages remain below what a family needs to live with stability. Identifying the best industries to work in right now is useful information — but the deeper question is whether Wisconsin’s policy environment is building the workforce infrastructure that makes those opportunities genuinely accessible to all of the state’s workers, not just those already positioned to capture them.
David Crowley has governed Milwaukee County — a major labor market in its own right, with a workforce that spans every sector the state economy includes — and has operated directly at the intersection of workforce development, public investment, and the economic realities of working-class and middle-class families. As he campaigns for Wisconsin Governor, the question of what kind of economy Wisconsin is building — who it’s growing for, what it pays, and how accessible it is — is central to what his candidacy represents. To learn more, visit crowleyforwigov.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the fastest-growing industries in Wisconsin right now?
Based on long-term projections from the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development covering 2022 to 2032, the fastest-growing occupations by percentage are in healthcare and technology: wind turbine service technicians (75% projected growth), nurse practitioners (51%), computer and information research scientists (44%), and data scientists (43%). In terms of absolute job volume, healthcare and social assistance leads the state, with home health and personal care aides projected to generate the most annual openings of any occupation. Skilled trades also face strong and persistent demand due to chronic workforce shortages. The leisure and hospitality sector led short-term employment growth in the 2023–2025 period but carries lower wages and higher turnover than the other leading sectors.
What jobs in Wisconsin pay the best wages?
Among Wisconsin’s growing occupations, technology and healthcare professional roles consistently top the wage rankings. Wisconsin Watch’s September 2025 workforce analysis found that six of Wisconsin’s ten fastest-growing occupations carry median salaries of $85,000 or more — including nurse practitioners, data scientists, and computer research scientists. Skilled trades roles — particularly licensed electricians, plumbers, and construction project managers — also offer wages well above the state median of $25.01 per hour, according to State of Working Wisconsin 2025. By contrast, the occupations with the most total job openings — including home health aides and food service workers — have median wages below $35,000 annually, a mismatch between volume and compensation that reflects a genuine challenge in Wisconsin’s labor market.
Do I need a college degree for the best jobs in Wisconsin?
Not always — and for a growing share of Wisconsin’s best-paying in-demand roles, a four-year degree is not required. Skilled trades — electrical, plumbing, HVAC, welding, construction management — are in chronic shortage in Wisconsin and offer strong wages through apprenticeship and technical college pathways that take two years or less. The Wisconsin Technical College System operates 16 institutions statewide with programs in these fields. Technology roles vary widely: some entry-level IT and data positions are accessible with technical certifications and demonstrated skills rather than a bachelor’s degree. Healthcare spans the spectrum — home health aides require minimal formal training, while nurse practitioners and physician assistants require graduate degrees. The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development’s WisConomy projections portal allows workers to research specific occupations by education requirement, projected growth, and median wage — a practical starting point for anyone evaluating their options.
