Leadership tops the list of emerging skills in US job openings
Employers are looking for strong leaders and employees with strong critical and analytical thinking skills. The fastest growing skills in demand suggest unpredictable economic and market conditions that require employees with the ability to respond quickly, chart a decisive course, and bring others along with them.
Communications roles command the highest salary increases year over year
Salaries offered for communications-related positions had a median increase of more than 25% year over year, suggesting an increased demand for story-telling and narrative. Similarly, management roles still show strong salary growth. As AI changes the nature of work, there is still a strong demand for humans in the loop who can oversee AI tools and interpret the meaning of the output.
Methodology
Market IQ collects job postings daily from over 7 million+ websites in the U.S. Our system automatically identifies, extracts, and structures job data into 100+ attributes using Textkernel’s AI powered parsing technology. Each posting is normalized against professional taxonomies, enriched with company information, and deduplicated using sophisticated algorithms to identify unique job opportunities. The system maintains high levels of accuracy through automated quality controls and continuous improvement processes, making it a trusted source for U.S. labor market insights.
Skills
Market IQ utilizes Textkernel’s proprietary Skills Normalization Taxonomy (SNT) to extract and normalize skills from job postings. Our taxonomy encompasses 13,200+ unique skill concepts mapped through 250,000+ terms, covering professional skills, IT skills, soft skills, and languages. Using advanced machine learning, the system identifies skills in context, disambiguates ambiguous terms, and normalizes them to standardized concepts—enabling accurate cross-market analysis regardless of how employers phrase skill requirements. The taxonomy is continuously updated quarterly based on millions of job postings, market feedback, and labor market trends. This data-driven approach ensures Market IQ captures both established and emerging skills as they appear in the U.S. job market, providing unparalleled insights into skill demand across industries and regions. All analysis of skills excludes any skills that appear in fewer than 10,000 job descriptions.
