A recent report placed Wilmington among the top cities nationally when it comes to job growth over the past decade.
 
The city ranked fifth among the 150 largest metro areas in the U.S. for percentage growth of total employment (29.6%) between 2015 and 2025, according to a September report from Economic Leadership, a Shallotte-based research group.
 
And that bump wasn’t just in the early part of the decade. Wilmington continued to see 16.4% employment growth since 2019. Breaking that down, white-collar jobs grew 26.2%, and service-sector jobs grew 12% since 2019, placing Wilmington third and second nationally in those categories, respectively.
 
Behind the stats are the people filling the jobs and people creating the jobs. But who are they, and what are they doing?
 
This year’s economy-focused WilmingtonBiz Magazine issue pulls back the curtain on some of them.
 
Those include major expansions, such as 1,000-plus Amazon jobs in the pipeline or hundreds more added at GE Vernova (read about those and other project updates here) and homegrown inventions that led to manufacturing activities (click here to see some of the innovative projects).
 
A la Myth Busters, Built Environments (profiled here) runs its mechanical testing lab on Wright Street to test materials and products under stress.
 
And in the waterways off the coast, faculty, staff and students will embark on more research-driven trips now that Wilmington’s two higher education institutions are getting newly built vessels (find out more here).
 
Throughout the area’s business sectors, innovation looks different from different angles, but throughout the following pages you can learn about those and see where the next batch of jobs might come from.