The local work report
Work in California
102,861
Live openings our index could see in California.
Counted exactly, against live rows, . Not a projection and not an annual average. A posting counts if its source still listed it at the most recent crawl.
12,168
11.8% of openings in California
read as entry level, on our reading of the posting text.
That label is ours, not the employer’s. We read it from the posting, and it is not perfect: in a 3,000-row sample, 0.6% of postings we call entry level carry a senior-sounding word in the title, and some of those are fine (“Shift Supervisor Trainee” really is a trainee role). Treat it as a good guide, not a guarantee.
The other 90,693 openings in California read as expecting experience a student does not have yet, which is a fact about the route rather than about them.
Which fields are hiring
Ranked by live openings. Shares are of the 97,884 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Technology and software
16,48216.8%
Healthcare
13,89414.2%
Sales and marketing
9,5099.7%
Retail
7,4717.6%
Manufacturing
5,7315.9%
Finance and accounting
5,2945.4%
Transportation and driving
5,1535.3%
Office and administration
4,4484.5%
Skilled trades
4,4054.5%
Business and operations
4,2524.3%
Customer service
4,0944.2%
Warehouse and logistics
3,7193.8%
Food service
3,1013.2%
Childcare and education
2,6662.7%
Engineering
1,6371.7%
Hospitality
1,4771.5%
General labor
1,3841.4%
Creative and media
1,3151.3%
Beauty and wellness
8340.9%
Security and safety
5970.6%
Science and research
2260.2%
Community and social services
720.1%
Agriculture and natural resources
640.1%
Legal
590.1%
A further 4,977 live openings in California carry no field in our index. They are real postings we have not classified, and they are excluded from the shares above rather than distributed into them.
Where the work is
The 12 places in California with the most live openings. For most students the honest answer to “can I do this without moving?” is on this list.
Place names are exactly as the employer wrote them and are not normalized, so one city can appear under several labels and a big metro can be split across them. Treat a row as a floor for that place, not as its total.
San Francisco
15,144
Los Angeles
6,075
San Diego
3,210
San Jose
2,816
El Segundo
2,515
Sunnyvale
1,858
Santa Clara
1,766
Mountain View
1,621
Costa Mesa
1,606
Palo Alto
1,596
Long Beach
1,395
Pico Heights
1,201
How much experience these postings ask for
Our reading of the posting text, not a field the employer filled in. Every live posting gets one of these three, so unlike the field breakdown above there is no “did not state” residue here — which is itself the sign that the label is inferred rather than reported.
- 12,168
- Reads as entry level
- 54,905
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 35,788
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for California at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the California labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of California is thinner than our coverage of most states. We hold 26 indexed openings per 10,000 residents here, against a median of 47 across the states we can read. That is a fact about our index, not about California’s economy, and the two are easy to confuse. Across all 52 the ratio between the best and worst covered is more than twentyfold, so comparing one state’s total against another’s tells you more about us than about them.
It is a floor, not a total. Nationally the index held 1,537,993 live US openings, of which 1,308,341 carry a state and 229,652 do not. Those unplaced postings are real work that we cannot put on a map, so every state figure on this page understates what exists.
Some of these postings will already be filled. Employers do not reliably take listings down, so a live posting means “still listed by its source”, not “confirmed open”. Anybody who tells a student otherwise is selling them something.