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These are the top 10 occupations that make it the hardest for workers to switch jobs, according to researchers

These are the top 10 occupations that make it the hardest for workers to switch jobs, according to researchers

Samantha Delouya

Heath Korvola/Getty Images

Researchers have found which jobs are the hardest to move around in, translating to less competitive pay.
The researchers say fewer employer options and less transferable skills make it hard to move around.

Researchers have uncovered the jobs that are hardest to switch out of — allowing respective employers to set lower wages for workers.

In a new study analyzing data from 16 million resumes, researchers from UCLA and MIT used two factors to find the types of jobs that make it hard to move around.

The first factor is employer concentration, meaning the number of different company options in specific areas where workers live. "If your employer controls a lot of the local jobs... then you'll get a phenomenon that's sort of the labor market equivalent of a monopoly," said Gregor Schubert, a co-author of the study and a UCLA Anderson School of Management finance professor.

Schubert and his team found that fewer local job options lead to less competitive wages.

"When you have few large employers and no other alternatives, then you'll just have to take whatever wage they offer you and take what you can get. You can't really negotiate," he said.

The other factor was whether the set of skills a person develops in their occupation is transferable to a different type of job.

"For instance, a lot of people who work in food service as waiters and waitresses are also able to move into being baristas or another sort of entry-level customer service job. And so when thinking about their labor market and how much bargaining power they have, we should really be thinking about the concentration of employers across all those different occupations," Schubert said.

The report found that registered nurses have the hardest time jumping between jobs.

"Nurses could be in local metro areas where there are very few hospitals. So there are just one or two hospital systems, so they don't really have a choice of employers," said Schubert.

"They're very unlikely to move to other jobs when they lose their current job, and that's sort of a mixture of whether or not their skills could transfer across different jobs. In addition to that, there licensing and administrative burdens to switching into other occupations for nurses," he added.

Here are the top 10 jobs that make it the hardest to move around, according to the report.