American Staffing Association releases list of ‘hard-to-fill’ jobs in the U.S.

What are the hardest jobs to fill in the U.S.? Alexandria-based American Staffing Association has an idea.

The association has released a list of the hardest-to-fill jobs in the U.S., with occupational and physical therapists taking the No. 1 and 2 spots, respectively.

The finding is based on ASA’s Skills Gap Index, which tracks the number of hardest-to-fill occupations in the country. The index found 207 occupations that are hard to fill. The top 10 are:

1. Occupational therapists
2. Physical therapists
3. Truck drivers, heavy and tractor-trailer
4. Occupational therapist assistants
5. Speech-language pathologists
6. Physician assistants
7. Merchandise displayers and window trimmers
8. Physical therapist assistants
9. Nursing instructors and teachers, postsecondary
10. Computer software engineers, applications

The skills gap index, updated quarterly, uses Career Builder's hiring indicator, which measures the level of difficulty to recruit for a specific job based on demand, supply of active candidates  and total population working in it on a scale of 1-100. Occupations with a score less than 50 and demand of 2,000 jobs or more were considered hard to fill.