Community Contributions (6/23)
What Job Postings Can Tell Us About Education Requirements
Tucker Plumlee, Director of Data & Analytics at the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness (CREC)
June 23, 2026
Welcome to Community Contributions, a blog series. These posts are written by National Labor Exchange (NLx) Research Hub community members, providing insight into what our users are doing with the NLx job posting data. This series will give you a glimpse of who the NLx Research Hub community is and how job posting data is incorporated into their work.
Our first series of Community Contributions posts highlights the Parsed Data Pilot the NLx Research Hub conducted April-May 2026. For this pilot, the NLx Research Hub utilized Amazon’s Nova Lite model to parse out pay information, degree mentions, remote status, part time status, and benefits mentions from 31.5 million job descriptions from 2024 and 2025. These blog posts highlight what pilot users discovered in their exploration of the parsed data. For more details on the parsing process, please reach out to the NLx Research Hub team, and stay tuned for more announcements on parsed data.
Understanding the level of education typically needed for a given occupation is critical for workforce planning:
Workforce boards need to know which jobs are attainable for their clients seeking training.
Policymakers and economic developers need to gauge the potential labor supply available to fill new roles in their region.
At the same time, education requirements can vary by time and place. Survey data on the educational attainment of the existing workforce from sources like the American Community Survey (ACS) can be useful for understanding these trends but typically have a significant lag between data collection and publication (1-1.5 years for 1-year ACS estimates). As a result, traditional sources of labor market information (LMI) can't capture more immediate shifts in employer requirements.
Job postings, such as the data provided by the National Labor Exchange (NLx) Research Hub, can often provide a more current, granular view of employer education requirements, often at finer geographic and occupational detail than surveys allow.
What Job Postings Can’t Tell Us: The Missing Information Challenge
However, a meaningful limitation of job posting data is that a large share of postings do not specify any formal education/training credential requirements. This holds true across multiple data sources:
~60% of the 31.5 million NLx postings from 2024–2025 lacked education requirements (see chart below).
51% of postings over the same period from third-party data provider Lightcast (Job Postings January 1, 2024 – December 31, 2025, accessed May 18, 2026) lacked education requirements.
52% of postings on Indeed.com as of January 2024 lacked education requirements.
Of course, this also varies by occupation (see chart below):
Occupation groups less likely to include education requirements: informal and service-based areas of the workforce (e.g., food preparation, arts and entertainment, and farming).
Occupation groups more likely to include education requirements: professionalized fields like business, engineering, and the sciences.
Education requirements could also be absent from postings because they are assumed due to professional regulations or licensing; this may be the case for legal occupations, many of which require a law degree as a baseline.
High School vs. Bachelor’s Bifurcation
Among postings that do list education requirements, however, the minimum requirement is overwhelmingly either a high school diploma or a bachelor's degree (see first chart above). Once again, this bifurcation appears across datasets/providers and suggests that these two credentials may function in job postings less as measures of competency and more as hiring gates; that is, tools for reducing the initial size of an applicant pool.
This idea is reinforced when considering the distribution of educational requirements in job postings versus educational attainment among the general population of working adults (see chart below):
Job postings request a bachelor's degree at nearly twice the rate of bachelor's attainment among working-age adults.
Education and training greater than high school but lower than a bachelor’s is over six times as prevalent in the workforce as in job posting requirements
Posted education requirements are, on average, higher than actual educational attainment of the workforce
Our organization’s recent work analyzing technology career pathways in Northern Virginia (a region with higher educational attainment than the rest of the country, on average) found that these same comparisons hold for regional geographies and different occupational areas (at least those that are technology related).
It is also important to recognize that job postings may mention education and workforce credentials but not as a requirement for employment. For example, a posting may indicate that a Master’s degree is a preferred credential, even if it is not a minimum requirement. The parsed data provided by NLx does allow for this distinction: 41% of postings include no mention of any education credential, required or otherwise. In other words, ~20% of postings mention credentials, but do not require them.
The Role of Non-Degree Credentials
Still, the disconnect between job posting requirements and workforce educational attainment may reflect a broader shift in how postsecondary credentials function in hiring, with degrees playing a more limited role in assessing a candidate’s minimum capabilities. Indeed, much has been made of the perceived decline in value of a college degree, particularly in the era of generative AI. At the same time, education and workforce professionals are increasingly recognizing the value of non-degree credentials and workforce training for job-readiness.
A notable advantage of NLx's parsed data, therefore, is the separation of vocational/technical training and certificates as a distinct category, something other job posting data providers like Lightcast do not offer. While the volume of postings in this category is small, it opens the door to addressing an important question: In which occupations and industries are nondegree requirements most frequent and what are the implications for workforce development investments? A valuable next step in the NLx’s efforts could be extracting information on specific industry certifications and occupational licenses.
Takeaways
Education requirements offer a powerful lens for understanding both the value and the limitations of job posting data. Ultimately, postings reflect the recruitment and hiring process, not necessarily the full dynamics of employment. Even so, job posting data provides an important means for gaining a more detailed, current, and dynamic understanding of labor market demand. The NLx's continued efforts to parse structured information from its uniquely curated dataset provide an important public utility for examining these questions in greater depth.
About the Author
Tucker Plumlee is the Director of Data & Analytics at the Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness (CREC), a nonprofit that equips community leaders, policymakers, and practitioners with data, insights, and tools to solve regional challenges. He leads development of the organization's data infrastructure and advances analytical methods in support of CREC's national networks and research initiatives.
