While Birmingham is adding construction and sales jobs, accountants and insurance agents, no other area is hiring at quite the rate of the food service industry.

The number of fast food workers, cooks and food prep workers has roughly tripled in the Birmingham metro when compared to the two years before the pandemic.

The workforce in the Birmingham-Hoover metro area now includes over 500,000 jobs, which the federal government sorts into numerous categories. While the metro lost around 36,000 jobs during the first year of the pandemic, it soon began to rebound, adding back 18,000 jobs by 2022.

Here are the fastest-growing job categories in the region between 2018 and 2022, and how much those jobs earn. The list includes fields with at least 1,000 workers in 2022.

[Can’t see the list? Click here.]

Most of the fastest-growing jobs are relatively low-wage positions. Fast food cooks were the single fastest-growing job, followed by food prep workers. In both cases, the median annual wage for the position is less than $25,000 per year, meaning half of the people doing that work get paid less than that.

None of the top four fastest-growing jobs saw a median wage higher than $30,000 per year.

The highest-earning field near the top of the list was construction managers, who earned a median annual wage of nearly $98,000. Construction managers had nearly doubled in the region between 2018 and 2022, good for the fifth fastest growing profession in the region.

Construction in general seems to have taken off since the pandemic, as construction laborers came in at No. 6 on the fastest-growing list.

You can explore the full list in the table above.

Do you have an idea for a data story about Alabama? Or questions about Alabama that data may be able to answer? Email Ramsey Archibald at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @RamseyArchibald. Read more Alabama data stories here.