Communication is the fastest-growing skill appearing in US job openings
Communication and teamwork top the list of skills showing up in more and more job descriptions across the U.S. Many of the top skills are relational in nature, highlighting a trend toward collaboration and coordination across teams and areas of expertise, reflecting the increasingly cross-functional nature of work, and the need for employees who can thrive in that environment.
Defense jobs show the biggest annual salary increases
Job openings in the defense field showed the biggest increase in posted salary over the course of 2025. Salaries for open defense roles rose nearly 17% on average, over twice as much as the next highest field, leisure. In general, this list suggests there are still areas of the labor market where demand for talent is high enough to command rising salaries, particularly in hands-on areas like cleaning and leisure, as well as in strategic fields like communication and engineering.
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.
