The local work report
Work in Virginia
37,746
Live openings our index could see in Virginia.
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.
4,664
12.4% of openings in Virginia
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 33,082 openings in Virginia 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 35,123 postings we could classify, never of the state total, because the unclassified remainder is real.
Healthcare
6,30317.9%
Technology and software
4,76613.6%
Retail
3,1318.9%
Skilled trades
3,0948.8%
Transportation and driving
2,8238.0%
Sales and marketing
2,1226.0%
Food service
1,8285.2%
Manufacturing
1,7875.1%
Childcare and education
1,6244.6%
Customer service
1,5054.3%
Finance and accounting
1,2503.6%
Warehouse and logistics
1,1213.2%
Office and administration
1,1033.1%
Business and operations
8972.6%
Hospitality
5221.5%
Security and safety
3310.9%
General labor
2280.6%
Beauty and wellness
2210.6%
Creative and media
1760.5%
Engineering
1500.4%
Community and social services
670.2%
Science and research
590.2%
Agriculture and natural resources
140.0%
Legal
10.0%
A further 2,623 live openings in Virginia 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 Virginia 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.
Arlington
2,010
Richmond
1,747
Reston
1,123
Virginia Beach
1,099
Alexandria
1,095
McLean
1,089
Chantilly
1,074
Fort Myer
1,013
Norfolk
909
State Farm
735
Chesapeake
674
Herndon
667
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.
- 4,664
- Reads as entry level
- 24,488
- Reads as expecting some experience
- 8,594
- Reads as senior or specialized
What this is, and what it is not
It is a count of job postings our index held for Virginia at the moment this page was built. It is not a census of the Virginia labor market, and it is not a forecast.
Our coverage of Virginia is about average for the states we can read. We hold 44 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 Virginia’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.