The local work report
Work in Kentucky
17,819
Live openings our index could see in Kentucky.
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.
2,599
14.6% of openings in Kentucky
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 15,220 openings in Kentucky 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 16,879 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Healthcare
3,70722.0%
Transportation and driving
2,46914.6%
Retail
2,03312.0%
Food service
1,2137.2%
Sales and marketing
1,0206.0%
Skilled trades
9335.5%
Warehouse and logistics
9055.4%
Customer service
8925.3%
Childcare and education
8114.8%
Manufacturing
6914.1%
Technology and software
6503.9%
Office and administration
3271.9%
Finance and accounting
2601.5%
General labor
2391.4%
Security and safety
1941.1%
Hospitality
1921.1%
Business and operations
1711.0%
Creative and media
690.4%
Agriculture and natural resources
450.3%
Beauty and wellness
350.2%
Engineering
160.1%
Science and research
50.0%
Legal
10.0%
Community and social services
10.0%
A further 940 live openings in Kentucky 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 12 places in Kentucky 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.
Louisville
2,194
Lexington
1,344
Frankfort
971
Strathmoor Manor
532
Florence
408
Bowling Green
346
Paducah
319
Elizabethtown
300
Hopeful Heights
285
Owensboro
248
Shepherdsville
225
Plum Springs
218
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.
- 2,599
- Reads as entry level
- 12,597
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 2,623
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for Kentucky at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the Kentucky labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of Kentucky is about average for the states we can read. We hold 40 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 Kentucky’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.