The local work report
Work in Wisconsin
21,548
Live openings our index could see in Wisconsin.
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.
3,107
14.4% of openings in Wisconsin
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 18,441 openings in Wisconsin 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 20,531 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Healthcare
4,22620.6%
Transportation and driving
2,41011.7%
Retail
2,11510.3%
Skilled trades
2,05510.0%
Food service
1,5277.4%
Customer service
1,2236.0%
Sales and marketing
1,1745.7%
Warehouse and logistics
1,0074.9%
Childcare and education
9664.7%
Manufacturing
9254.5%
Technology and software
7433.6%
Office and administration
5942.9%
Finance and accounting
5302.6%
General labor
2861.4%
Hospitality
2371.2%
Security and safety
2101.0%
Business and operations
1630.8%
Engineering
450.2%
Beauty and wellness
370.2%
Creative and media
360.2%
Science and research
80.0%
Community and social services
80.0%
Agriculture and natural resources
60.0%
A further 1,017 live openings in Wisconsin 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 Wisconsin 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.
Madison
1,508
Milwaukee
1,139
Waukesha
424
Fitchburg
389
Appleton
375
Green Bay
361
West Milwaukee
317
Brookfield
291
La Crosse
289
Saint Francis
268
Oshkosh
255
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.
- 3,107
- Reads as entry level
- 15,479
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 2,962
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for Wisconsin at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the Wisconsin labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of Wisconsin is about average for the states we can read. We hold 37 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 Wisconsin’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.