By some accounts, the worldwide spend on management consulting has breached the $1 trillion mark – and it’s growing. There are many deep pockets of expertise in this world, but there is one area that is emerging as a singular priority for management consultants.

Before making a career transition, it’s important to understand your underlying motivations for wanting a change. Identifying your pain points – the source of your stress or anxiety – is the first step in resolving that pain and moving towards a better place in your professional life.

There is little question that AI is the main buzzword in information technology these days. US business leaders are poised to invest heavily in it in the coming year. And hiring for AI-related tech jobs was up despite significant negative employment trends in other tech-related fields. But there are still plenty of hot topics in IT besides AI!

Sometimes our clients are surprised at first to hear about paid search. They ask, why should I pay for career management services? Well, the return on investment for using career management services can be 30-fold or more. So, the better question is, why incur the opportunity cost of not employing a career management firm?

Demand for engineering talent has certainly seen changes in some industries – sometimes radical changes. But there is no lack of interesting opportunities for engineers, rather a lack of understanding about how to discover them. And the areas of fastest hiring growth are, in some cases, surprising.

Between the stock market’s gyrations, flaring violence on Europe’s eastern border and in Gaza, vitriolic politics, and macroeconomic upheaval, it would be easy to assume that the market for executives is holding its breath at the moment. That does not seem to be the case. The Barrett Group sees only vibrant activity in this market.

It is so easy to be distracted by all the doom and gloom in the world, but there is one bright spot: Our clients are landing executive positions at a prodigious rate! And not just any positions, but worthy ones and well-rewarded.

While some market segments are indeed slowing down as economies cool, one in particular is busy booming: the Non-profit Executive Market. It promises a lot of opportunity—the kind that The Barrett Group renders attainable every day.

Last week, six executive clients found jobs, 40 landed positions between June and July, and 75% of them landed through the unpublished market. How did they do it? Much of it had to do with being the right person at the right time.

At the end of July a hiccup in the labor market spooked stock markets and many investors headed for the exits. Indeed, there may well be reasons to consider stocks overvalued, but not because of the labor markets, and especially not the market for executives.