Birmingham's 25 best careers for high pay and strong job growth

In this week's edition, our weekly List ranked the 50 highest paying jobs in Birmingham – you can see a preview of that List here.

 

Considering it's the new year – a time when many people contemplate a career change – we decided to crunch some data to determine which career fields in Birmingham are both high paying and offer strong growth potential between now and 2020.

 

To do that, we used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine the highest paying jobs by average annual salary and the best fields for job growth, which were calculated based on percentage growth expected from 2012 to 2020.

 

In case you were wondering, the highest-paying job is psychiatrist ($240,210), while the best field for job growth is physician assistant (38.4 percent growth).

 

After compiling those numbers, we used a weighted formula (which puts a little extra emphasis on job growth) to determine Birmingham's top career field, which are highlighted in the slideshow on the right.