Wisdom of Crowds for Predicting Hot Jobs in the Near Future

Existing studies supply many instances of crowd wisdom in simple numerical cognitive problems. However, is the crowd still wise in consideration of complex realistic problems? Little research focuses on this situation. In this paper we investigated the wisdom of crowds on a daily topic: what are the Hot Jobs of the near future. Three research hypotheses are proposed to assist with the problem. Instead of directly using the ambiguous concept of Hot Jobs, we give it a statistical metric that consists of 3 components; high wages, strong projected growth and strong current demand. The data are collected from both survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). And then, we compare the outcomes between the crowd estimates with the top ranked estimates from BLS. We find that the crowd estimation on Hot Jobs in the near future can be wise when the estimative outcomes are measured by specific numerical information. Estimates of individuals are poor that only few people make correct forecastings. The study suggests that despite given a realistic complex problem, the crowd can still make a relatively good prediction without a complex aggregation approach.