The local work report
Work in South Dakota
16,698
Live openings our index could see in South Dakota.
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.
1,951
11.7% of openings in South Dakota
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 14,747 openings in South Dakota 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 14,030 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Healthcare
4,16929.7%
Transportation and driving
2,28516.3%
Retail
1,3649.7%
Sales and marketing
1,0707.6%
Technology and software
8305.9%
Food service
7135.1%
Customer service
5704.1%
Skilled trades
5453.9%
Manufacturing
5223.7%
Childcare and education
3542.5%
Finance and accounting
3242.3%
Warehouse and logistics
2992.1%
Business and operations
2161.5%
Office and administration
2111.5%
Creative and media
1471.0%
Hospitality
1260.9%
General labor
1160.8%
Agriculture and natural resources
790.6%
Security and safety
540.4%
Beauty and wellness
240.2%
Science and research
50.0%
Engineering
50.0%
Community and social services
20.0%
A further 2,668 live openings in South Dakota 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 South Dakota 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.
Sioux Falls
2,750
Pierre
2,207
Rapid City
1,393
Aberdeen
507
Watertown
381
Mitchell
370
Old Town
300
Yankton
269
Brookings
224
Harrisburg
197
Lake Campbell
186
Ellis
164
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.
- 1,951
- Reads as entry level
- 11,909
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 2,838
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for South Dakota at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the South Dakota labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of South Dakota is richer than our coverage of most states. We hold 188 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 South Dakota’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.