The local work report
Work in Washington
9,799
Live openings our index could see in Washington.
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.
1,003
10.2% of openings in Washington
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 8,796 openings in Washington 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 9,139 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Technology and software
1,55817.0%
Healthcare
1,37915.1%
Retail
8259.0%
Sales and marketing
7117.8%
Customer service
4705.1%
Transportation and driving
4705.1%
Business and operations
4454.9%
Warehouse and logistics
4434.8%
Finance and accounting
4264.7%
Skilled trades
4244.6%
Food service
4174.6%
Manufacturing
4134.5%
Office and administration
2863.1%
Engineering
1902.1%
General labor
1832.0%
Hospitality
1131.2%
Creative and media
1041.1%
Childcare and education
991.1%
Beauty and wellness
790.9%
Security and safety
360.4%
Community and social services
210.2%
Legal
200.2%
Science and research
180.2%
Agriculture and natural resources
90.1%
A further 660 live openings in Washington 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 Washington 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.
Seattle
2,573
Redmond
811
Bellevue
728
DC
278
Tacoma
246
Everett
244
Spokane
238
Kent
228
Richland
215
Vancouver
187
Bothell
180
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.
- 1,003
- Reads as entry level
- 5,585
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 3,211
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for Washington at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the Washington labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of Washington is thinner than our coverage of most states. We hold 13 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 Washington’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.