The local work report
Work in Illinois
38,300
Live openings our index could see in Illinois.
Counted exactly, against live rows, . Not a projection and not an annual average. A posting counts if its source still listed it at the most recent crawl.
5,651
14.8% of openings in Illinois
read as entry level, on our reading of the posting text.
That label is ours, not the employer’s. We read it from the posting, and it is not perfect: in a 3,000-row sample, 0.6% of postings we call entry level carry a senior-sounding word in the title, and some of those are fine (“Shift Supervisor Trainee” really is a trainee role). Treat it as a good guide, not a guarantee.
The other 32,649 openings in Illinois read as expecting experience a student does not have yet, which is a fact about the route rather than about them.
Which fields are hiring
Ranked by live openings. Shares are of the 36,441 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Healthcare
8,29722.8%
Retail
2,9368.1%
Transportation and driving
2,7997.7%
Sales and marketing
2,7607.6%
Technology and software
2,4176.6%
Skilled trades
2,1736.0%
Customer service
2,1035.8%
Finance and accounting
1,8765.1%
Manufacturing
1,8365.0%
Food service
1,8225.0%
Childcare and education
1,6184.4%
Office and administration
1,5524.3%
Warehouse and logistics
1,5364.2%
Business and operations
6391.8%
Hospitality
5791.6%
Security and safety
4351.2%
General labor
3150.9%
Beauty and wellness
2630.7%
Creative and media
2190.6%
Engineering
1470.4%
Science and research
520.1%
Community and social services
490.1%
Agriculture and natural resources
150.0%
Legal
30.0%
A further 1,859 live openings in Illinois carry no field in our index. They are real postings we have not classified, and they are excluded from the shares above rather than distributed into them.
Where the work is
The 11 places in Illinois with the most live openings. For most students the honest answer to “can I do this without moving?” is on this list.
Place names are exactly as the employer wrote them and are not normalized, so one city can appear under several labels and a big metro can be split across them. Treat a row as a floor for that place, not as its total.
Chicago
7,424
North Chicago
782
Springfield
591
Naperville
479
Illinois Medical District
469
Schiller Park
442
Winfield
425
Schaumburg
374
Champaign
313
Aurora
304
Peoria
304
How much experience these postings ask for
Our reading of the posting text, not a field the employer filled in. Every live posting gets one of these three, so unlike the field breakdown above there is no “did not state” residue here — which is itself the sign that the label is inferred rather than reported.
- 5,651
- Reads as entry level
- 24,294
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 8,355
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for Illinois at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the Illinois labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of Illinois is thinner than our coverage of most states. We hold 30 indexed openings per 10,000 residents here, against a median of 47 across the states we can read. That is a fact about our index, not about Illinois’s economy, and the two are easy to confuse. Across all 52 the ratio between the best and worst covered is more than twentyfold, so comparing one state’s total against another’s tells you more about us than about them.
It is a floor, not a total. Nationally the index held 1,537,993 live US openings, of which 1,308,341 carry a state and 229,652 do not. Those unplaced postings are real work that we cannot put on a map, so every state figure on this page understates what exists.
Some of these postings will already be filled. Employers do not reliably take listings down, so a live posting means “still listed by its source”, not “confirmed open”. Anybody who tells a student otherwise is selling them something.