Careers with the Largest Salary Growth Potential

Many young job seekers are eager to earn money, but the promise of a high starting salary shouldn't be prioritized over future earning potential. Many occupations have uninspiring entry level salaries, but the more important factor is the ability for employees to increase their wages.

With this in mind, CareerTrends looked at 21 different career fields and found the occupation with the highest difference between entry level and well experienced salaries in each field. To do this, we used the most recent employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (May 2014) and salary data from the Foreign Labor Certification Data Center (June 2015) to find each occupation's average starting salary. We then took the job’s average well experienced salary and subtracted the average starting salary to get the salary difference.

All of the 21 jobs we selected had salary differences of at least $20,000. We ranked them from lowest to highest, including two occupations with six-figure differences between entry level and well experienced salaries.