Problem-solving climbs the list of desired soft skills
Employers continue to seek workers with leadership skills and strong critical and analytical thinking skills. Leadership and decision-making have consistently been at the top of the list. However, this month, problem-solving and creative problem-solving both gained more prominence, perhaps as macroeconomic and market uncertainty, particularly with the war in the Middle East, present organizations with more thorny problems to solve in the near future.
Job growth for recent graduates remains behind the rest of the market
March saw an increase in job openings across all education and experience levels except for those candidates with just an associate’s degree. However, the increases were not evenly distributed. Bachelor’s degree jobs bounced back from a steep decline in February, but jobs for those with the degree plus years of prior experience increased much more than those for recent graduates. Job openings for those with a bachelor’s degree and more than five years of experience increased 16% in March, compared to just 8% for those with a bachelor’s degree and no further work experience. When combined with the recent finding that internship opportunities are drying up, it begs the question of how this year’s college graduates are going to develop the crucial work experience they need to succeed professionally.
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.
