With over 150 million LinkedIn members in the United States, we have unique insight into the real-time dynamics of Americans starting new jobs, learning new skills, and moving to new cities. This month’s LinkedIn Workforce Report looks at our latest national data on hiring, skills, and migration trends through July 2018. For more insight into localized employment trends in 20 of the largest U.S. metro areas, check out this month’s reports for: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland-Akron, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.

Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Whether you’re a worker, an employer, a new grad, or a policymaker, we hope you’ll use these insights to better understand and navigate the dynamics of today’s economy.

Key Insights

• Hiring | Summer of strong hiring continues through July – Nationally, across all industries, gross hiring in the U.S. was 4.6% higher than in July 2017. Seasonally-adjusted national hiring was up 0.5% in July from June 2018. The industries with the biggest year-over-year hiring increases in June were agriculture (26% higher); manufacturing (12.3% higher); and transportation & logistics (12% higher). Hiring in these sectors is running strong today, but they are also among the most vulnerable to a trade war escalation.
• Skills Gaps | Demand for data scientists is off the charts – In 2015, there was a national surplus of people with data science skills.  An employer in Dallas or Atlanta who wanted to hire data scientists had plenty of options; aside from in a few tech or finance-heavy cities like San Francisco, New York City and Boston, there weren’t many local shortages. But today, 3 years later, the picture has changed markedly: data science skills shortages are present in almost every large U.S. city. Nationally, we have a shortage of 151,717 people with data science skills, with particularly acute shortages in New York City (34,032 people), the San Francisco Bay Area (31,798 people), and Los Angeles (12,251 people). As more industries rely on big data to make decisions, data science has become increasingly important across all industries, not just tech and finance. In that sense, it’s a good proxy for how today’s cutting-edge skills like AI & machine learning may spread to other industries and geographies in the future.

• Migration | Austin’s job market has never been hotter  –  In July, hiring in Austin, TX, was up 14.3% from last year. The strong job market is drawing people from all over the country, bringing Austin to #1 on our ranking of U.S. cities attracting the most workers. For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in Austin today, 105 arrived in the past 12 months. Of those arrivals, 10.5% are from Houston, 7.6% are from San Francisco, and 4.8% are from New York. Austin’s thriving tech scene is a big magnet, as indicated by large skills shortages in development tools and data storage technologies. But the city also has severe shortages in non-domain-specific skills like oral communication and digital literacy.

   

Hiring | Summer of strong hiring continues through July

The LinkedIn hiring rate is a measure of gross hires divided by LinkedIn membership. Nationally, across all industries, gross hiring in the U.S. was 4.6% higher than in July 2017.

Seasonally-adjusted national hiring was up 0.5% in July from June 2018.

The industries with the biggest year-over-year hiring increases in July were agriculture (26% higher); manufacturing (12.3% higher); and transportation & logistics (12% higher). These sectors are running strong today, but they are also among the most vulnerable to a trade war escalation.

(Note: This month we updated our industry taxonomy from 13 industry groupings to 24 industry groupings, in order to provide more granular insights. Let us know if you have any feedback on the new format!)

Table 1: Hiring on LinkedIn, by Industry, through July 2018

Skills Gaps | Demand for data scientists is off the charts

In 2015, there was a national surplus of people with data science skills.  An employer in Dallas or Atlanta who wanted to hire data scientists had plenty of options; aside from in a few tech or finance-heavy cities like San Francisco, New York City and Boston, there weren’t many local shortages.

But today, 3 years later, the picture has changed markedly: data science skills shortages are present in almost every large U.S. city. Nationally, we have a shortage of 151,717 people with data science skills, with particularly acute shortages in New York City (34,032 people), the San Francisco Bay Area (31,798 people), and Los Angeles (12,251 people). As more industries rely on big data to make decisions, data science has become increasingly important across all industries, not just tech and finance. In that sense, it’s a good proxy for how today’s cutting-edge skills like AI & machine learning may spread to other industries and geographies in the future.

Table 2: The intensification of local shortages for data science skills, July 2015 to July 2018

This shortage of people with data science skills is smaller, but growing faster, than the national shortage of software development skills (which includes programming languages, like C++ and Java). Today there’s a shortage of 212,838 people with software development skills. But 3 years ago, software development skills were already in shortage nationally—so the “intensification” of the shortage for data science is actually larger than that for software development.

There are still cities in the U.S. today with surpluses of data science skills, where an employer could potentially find and recruit from untapped talent pools, but they are few and far between. The ten biggest cities with data science skills surpluses are Cleveland-Akron (1,206 people), Minneapolis (832 people), Cincinnati (770 people), Greensboro-Winston Salem (601 people), Kansas City (521 people), Milwaukee (430 people), Memphis (331 people ), Dayton (323 people), Birmingham (308 people), and Louisville (247 people). But these surpluses are all relatively small and narrowing rapidly. There is a big opportunity for people who are interested in data science to learn new skills and successfully find a job in this in-demand field.

(Note: This month we updated the skills gap methodology in the LinkedIn Workforce Report to include absolute headcounts to precisely measure skills gaps. To learn more about this updated methodology, see here.)

A skills gap is the gap between supply and demand for a specific skill, in a specific local labor market, at a specific point in time. That means that skills gaps are fundamentally local, and specific to the supply and demand of individual skills within a labor market. The U.S. cities with the largest skills gaps overall are New York City, San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles.

New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles also see the greatest shortages across all skills. To see which skills are driving these massive shortages, check out our localized reports.

The cities with the greatest surpluses across all skills are New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. You’ll notice that New York City has the biggest shortages and surpluses; because it is the most populous city, its shortages and surpluses have greater magnitudes.

Check out our localized reports for Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland-Akron, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C., to see top skills in demand locally and other insights.

Migration | Austin’s job market has never been hotter

In July 2018, hiring in Austin was up 14.3% from a year prior. The strong job market is drawing people from all over the country, bringing Austin to #1 on our ranking of U.S. cities attracting the most workers.

For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in Austin, TX, 105 arrived in the past 12 months. Of those arrivals, 10.5% are from Houston, 7.6% are from San Francisco, and 4.8% are from New York. Austin’s thriving tech scene is a big magnet, as indicated by large skills shortages in development tools and data storage technologies. But the city also has severe shortages in non-domain-specific skills like oral communication and digital literacy.

Overall, the U.S. cities gaining the most people are Austin, Denver, and Nashville. For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in Austin, 105 arrived in the last 12 months.

(Note: This month you’ll notice some smaller U.S. cities pop up in our migration rankings. That’s because we have updated our migration methodology to include movements between all cities, rather than between the 50 largest U.S. cities as in previous reports.)

The cities losing the most people are Wichita, Bryan-College Station, and Urbana-Champaign. For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in Wichita, 280 left in the past 12 months.

Austin, Denver, and San Diego are the U.S. cities experiencing the most total migration (workers moving into and out of a city). This list captures the most transient cities. For every 10,000 LinkedIn members in Austin, 681.3 arrived in or left the city in the last 12 months.

Check out our reports for Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland-Akron, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C., to see which skills are in shortage in those cities, and which jobs are open.