The local work report
Work in West Virginia
10,527
Live openings our index could see in West Virginia.
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.
1,087
10.3% of openings in West Virginia
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 9,440 openings in West Virginia 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 9,670 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Healthcare
2,88029.8%
Transportation and driving
1,76518.3%
Retail
1,11311.5%
Sales and marketing
6646.9%
Technology and software
5495.7%
Food service
4815.0%
Customer service
4744.9%
Skilled trades
3723.8%
Manufacturing
2842.9%
Warehouse and logistics
2112.2%
Childcare and education
1621.7%
Office and administration
1461.5%
Finance and accounting
1431.5%
Business and operations
1351.4%
General labor
1081.1%
Hospitality
720.7%
Security and safety
460.5%
Creative and media
220.2%
Engineering
180.2%
Beauty and wellness
120.1%
Agriculture and natural resources
100.1%
Community and social services
30.0%
A further 857 live openings in West Virginia 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 West Virginia 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.
Charleston
1,725
Westover
493
Martinsburg
406
Weirton
320
Morgantown
245
Bethlehem
233
Huntington
223
Beckley
160
Fort Neal
138
North Hills
137
Wheeling
136
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.
- 1,087
- Reads as entry level
- 7,649
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 1,791
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for West Virginia at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the West Virginia labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of West Virginia is about average for the states we can read. We hold 59 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 West Virginia’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.