Analytical thinking and leadership top the list of desirable skills
This month’s job opening saw a shift from personal traits like trustworthiness and friendliness to more strictly professional ones like analytical thinking and leadership. Perhaps as the market conditions get more unpredictable again employers are looking to hire people who can strategically problem solve and lead the organization through whatever comes next.
Construction and engineering roles are commanding higher salaries
Given the tremendous increase in data center construction and the continued growth in manufacturing and construction jobs, it is not a surprise that construction, engineering, and warehouse roles have some of the fastest growing salaries across the U.S. job market. Competition for talent in these areas remains fierce. Management and legal roles are also seeing rising compensation, in spite of concerns that AI may take on more and more work in these areas.
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.
