20 high-paying, growing jobs that only need a high school diploma

20. Operating engineers and other construction equipment operators

19. Plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters

18. Machinists

17. Production, planning, and expediting clerks

16. First-line supervisors of production and operating workers

15. Chefs and head cooks

14. Welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers

13. Transit and intercity bus drivers

12. First-line supervisors of transportation and material-moving workers, except aircraft cargo handling supervisors

11. Flight attendants

10. Insurance sales agents

9. First-line supervisors of personal service and entertainment and recreation workers, except gambling services

8. First-line supervisors of mechanics, installers, and repairers

7. Food service managers

6. First-line supervisors of construction trades and extraction workers

5. Police and sheriff's patrol officers

4. Sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, except technical and scientific products

3. Electricians

2. Industrial machinery mechanics

1. Sales representatives of services, except advertising, insurance, financial services, and travel

How we ranked the above occupations

Not every job that pays higher than the median annual wage and is projected to see job growth over the decade requires a college education. 

For this ranking, Insider first took the geometric mean of median annual wages and projected employment growth from 2020 to 2030 using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Because we were interested in jobs that pay at least the median annual wage, we excluded jobs that paid less than $41,950 a year, the median wage for all occupations in 2020 per data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Home health and personal care aides, which has a typical education requirement of a high school diploma or equivalent, are projected to grow the most between 2020 and 2030 with over 1.1 million new jobs. But this occupation pays $27,080, almost $15,000 less than the median wage in 2020. Therefore, it's one job that was excluded in our analysis of high-paying, growing jobs.

After putting together this overall list of high-paying, growing jobs, we filtered our list so only occupations that typically need a high school diploma or equivalent at the minimum were left. We ranked those based on their geometric mean, where a higher geometric means a higher spot on the list.

It's important to note that the pandemic has affected the latest projections, where some occupations are projected to have above-average cyclical recovery after losing thousands or millions of positions over the last year.

"Because 2020 serves as the base year for the 2020–30 projections, these recession impacts translate to lower base-year values than seen in recent projections and, therefore, higher projected employment growth," BLS wrote, where total employment is projected to grow by 11.9 million jobs.

In addition to median annual wages and projected change in employment, we included above on-the-job training for each occupation. This comes from six categories listed by BLS and can range from no on-the job-training to long-term on-the-job training, the latter taking over 12 months.