The local work report
Work in Iowa
17,156
Live openings our index could see in Iowa.
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.
2,046
11.9% of openings in Iowa
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 15,110 openings in Iowa 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 15,977 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Healthcare
3,66322.9%
Retail
1,93812.1%
Transportation and driving
1,91912.0%
Sales and marketing
1,4128.8%
Food service
9706.1%
Skilled trades
9065.7%
Technology and software
8835.5%
Manufacturing
8335.2%
Customer service
6954.4%
Warehouse and logistics
6023.8%
Childcare and education
5373.4%
Office and administration
3572.2%
Finance and accounting
2611.6%
General labor
2511.6%
Security and safety
2431.5%
Business and operations
1911.2%
Hospitality
1390.9%
Agriculture and natural resources
600.4%
Creative and media
430.3%
Beauty and wellness
340.2%
Engineering
340.2%
Science and research
30.0%
Community and social services
20.0%
Legal
10.0%
A further 1,179 live openings in Iowa 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 Iowa 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.
Des Moines
1,693
Cedar Rapids
989
Davenport
548
Iowa City
450
Council Bluffs
431
South Des Moines
429
Sioux City
380
Ames
332
West Des Moines
301
Dubuque
277
Ankeny
276
Bettendorf
274
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.
- 2,046
- Reads as entry level
- 12,697
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 2,413
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for Iowa at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the Iowa labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of Iowa is about average for the states we can read. We hold 54 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 Iowa’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.