The local work report
Work in Pennsylvania
49,693
Live openings our index could see in Pennsylvania.
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.
8,419
16.9% of openings in Pennsylvania
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 41,274 openings in Pennsylvania 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 47,452 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Healthcare
12,06325.4%
Retail
4,72610.0%
Skilled trades
4,2468.9%
Transportation and driving
3,6307.6%
Food service
2,7145.7%
Customer service
2,6795.6%
Childcare and education
2,5565.4%
Sales and marketing
2,4025.1%
Technology and software
2,3505.0%
Warehouse and logistics
2,2534.7%
Manufacturing
1,9114.0%
Office and administration
1,4143.0%
Finance and accounting
1,3772.9%
Hospitality
8621.8%
Security and safety
6821.4%
Business and operations
5761.2%
General labor
3420.7%
Beauty and wellness
2520.5%
Creative and media
1870.4%
Engineering
1140.2%
Science and research
630.1%
Community and social services
350.1%
Agriculture and natural resources
120.0%
Legal
60.0%
A further 2,241 live openings in Pennsylvania 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 Pennsylvania 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.
Pittsburgh
2,911
Philadelphia
2,899
King of Prussia
782
Lancaster
641
Danville
612
Allentown
601
Harrisburg
515
William Penn Annex East
508
Penbrook
505
Barre
505
Scranton
484
Erie
400
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.
- 8,419
- Reads as entry level
- 34,027
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 7,247
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for Pennsylvania at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the Pennsylvania labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of Pennsylvania is about average for the states we can read. We hold 38 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 Pennsylvania’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.