Job growth in the healthcare sector outpaced all other industries for freelancers in the new LinkedIn 2017 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report, and technology chops are increasingly critical to many careers in the future.

The social network’s research, in fact, found that the 5-year growth for healthcare jobs is at 47 percent among freelancers and 20 percent for non-freelance employees. Second to healthcare, LinkedIn put retail and consumer products at 42 and 5 percent, respectively.

The staffing industry is an interesting comparison because freelance growth was lower than healthcare at 41 percent but higher, at 30 percent, for those non-freelance employees. Oil and energy at 39 percent and 9 percent and professional services, with 34 percent and 15 percent, rounded out the list of 5-year growth sectors.

Across all industries, technology jobs exploded in the last five years. In its earlier November Workforce Report, LinkedIn found that hiring rose 10 percent in hardware and 15 percent in software since the same time in 2016.

LinkedIn identified the top emerging jobs and some of them are particularly relevant to healthcare organizations.

“We are seeing more specialized machine learning and data- specific roles top the list of emerging jobs widely available outside the technology industry,” the researchers said.

Specifically, the top five emerging jobs are machine learning engineer, data scientist, sales development representative, customer success manager, big data developer. While the sales and customer success roles may not be every day roles in hospitals, more and more healthcare provider and health IT companies are hiring the other three.

Professionals with those forward-looking skillsets, in fact, will be hot candidates on the open job market.

“Data scientist roles have grown over 650 percent since 2012, but currently 35,000 people in the US have data science skills,” LinkedIn authors wrote. “While hundreds of companies are hiring for those roles, supply of candidates cannot keep up with demand.”

The researchers also mapped out the top skills each of those emerging jobs require. Machine learning engineers need to understand research, algorithms, software and Deep Learning, while data scientists have to understand machine learning, analytics, data mining and Python. Big data developers, meanwhile, should master Hadoop, Java, Apache Hive and understand startups.

The shift to digital skills also means that some legacy technology know-how is becoming less relevant  — as general skillsets are being replaced with more specific ones.

Twitter: SullyHIT
Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com