Georgia Data Lab
National Real-Time Labor Market Intelligence — a 12-month job posting analysis (June 2025 – June 2026) contextualizing where Georgia sits in the national hiring landscape. Interactive dashboards drawn from JobsEQ® Real-Time Intelligence covering 33.4M active U.S. job postings.
By Prince S. Tokpah, MPA, PMP · Data as of June 13, 2026
How employers specify education requirements
Across 33.4M active postings, 55% list no education requirement at all — and only 18% explicitly require a bachelor's degree. Skills-based hiring is now the structural default in the U.S. labor market, reshaping how workforce systems in Georgia should prioritize credentials, apprenticeships, and short-cycle training.
Only 18% of postings explicitly required a bachelor's degree. Skills-based hiring is now the structural default.
Top 10 hiring metropolitan markets — active postings
Atlanta ranks #4 nationally with 228,510 active postings, ahead of Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles. Georgia's core metro is punching well above its population weight, reinforcing Atlanta's role as a national labor magnet across logistics, healthcare, and professional services.
Top 10 occupations by active posting volume
Registered Nurses top the national list with 2.05M active postings — nearly double the next occupation. Three of the top ten are healthcare roles, underlining sustained clinical labor demand that mirrors Georgia's own workforce pressure points in nursing, allied health, and social services.
Top industries by active posting volume
Administrative & Support Services (2.64M) and Retail Trade (2.39M) lead posting volume, followed by Healthcare & Social Assistance (1.82M). For Georgia's workforce boards, this reinforces the need to align credential pipelines with the sectors doing the heaviest hiring today.
Most-requested hard skills (active postings)
The Microsoft Office suite dominates hard-skill demand — Office (3.02M) and Excel (2.95M) each appear in more postings than any professional certification. Physical requirements (lifting 41–100 lbs) also rank in the top five, reflecting the enduring weight of warehouse, logistics, and frontline retail work.
Digital productivity — not a specialized certification — is the new baseline employment credential.
Most-requested soft skills (active postings)
Written and verbal communication appears in 18.2M postings — more than half of every active ad in the dataset — followed by team collaboration (13.2M). Communication is now the single most frequently specified competency in the U.S. labor market, well ahead of any technical skill.
Communication + collaboration together appear in a majority of every posting analyzed.
Most-requested credentials
Basic Life Support (1.5M), Registered Nurse licensure (1.13M), and Driver's License (1.13M) lead all credentials. Healthcare credentials collectively appear in 4.4M+ postings — the largest structured training demand in the national labor market, and a direct signal for Georgia's community colleges and technical training providers.
Healthcare credentials represent the single largest structured training demand nationally.
Data source: Chmura Economics & Analytics, JobsEQ® Real-Time Intelligence. Dataset: 33,426,935 active online U.S. job postings, June 13, 2025 – June 13, 2026, exported June 13, 2026. Volumes reflect active-ad counts; some roles appear in multiple months.
About PPV's Methodology: PPV connects policy decisions with real-world workforce and economic impacts. Analysis is evidence-based, nonpartisan, and transparently sourced. Claims are grounded in primary sources, public data, and verifiable program documentation. Speculation is labeled as such.