The cannabis industry’s job growth is outpacing all other industries in the United States, according to ZipRecruiter.com co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ian Siegel.
ZipRecruiter offers a job search app designed for both prospective employees and employers. According to Siegel, ZipRecruiter is the “fastest growing employment marketplace” and has “helped over 1 million businesses and 100 million job seekers find their next perfect match.” This should make the company’s insight into the expanding cannabis market valuable.
Siegel is noticing aggressive growth in the market even as cannabis is not legal throughout the United States yet.
“Twenty-nine states have legalized marijuana. There’s 445-percent job growth in job listings in the category year over year,” he told a recent conference, according to Forbes.
According to a report from ZipRecruiter that utilized the company’s internal data, tech companies are growing at a rate of 245 percent by year and the healthcare industry is growing by 70 percent.
“Our Q4 data for 2017 revealed an especially dramatic leap in the number of new cannabis industry job posts,” the report said. “The number of cannabis industry job posts increased 693% year over year and 79% quarter over quarter.”
Siegel spoke about how traditional education is struggling to keep up with industries such as cannabis that can emerge out of seemingly nowhere.
“The things that happen societally, and the way we try to predict what you should teach kids, they happen so fast and they often happen in ways that are jarring enough that it’s hard to get our brains around it,” he said. “I would never encourage the members of the audience to try to predict the future and adjust curriculum based on that. I don’t think that’s a viable strategy.”
Although ZipRecruiter’s numbers show impressive growth for the cannabis industry, they may not tell the whole story. The cannabis industry helps the growth of ancillary products and professional services. Dispensaries need typically need to be built or retrofitted to meet specific regulations. This often opens up opportunities for construction companies. Dispensaries also need surveillance equipment, display cases, accountants, lawyers and more.
Job openings stimulated by legal cannabis that do not directly deal with the industry or products are not likely to be considered in reports such as ZipRecruiter’s.
