Insight for the real world—at every level of the labor market.
Lightcast software, consulting, and data delivery are all powered by best-in-class data, with the world’s most detailed information about skills, jobs, and supply and demand throughout the labor market. We deliver clarity to enterprise and staffing, education institutions, and regional leaders.
Data for decisions
Lightcast data has the breadth and depth to power practical decisions—centered on skills. We enable:
Pioneering the analysis of job postings
The millions of job postings put up worldwide every day show us exactly what employers are looking for: specific skills, education, and responsibilities. Lightcast pioneered the collection and big-data analysis of job postings, gathering data from more than 65,000 sources daily, including job boards, company websites, and other sources.
Using natural-language processing technology and other AI tools, along with dedicated in-house experts, our tools extract more than 70 different elements from every job posting. By analyzing and interpreting these elements, Lightcast data can provide insight on:
● Job titles
● Job responsibilities
● Hard and soft skills in demand
● Experience requirements
● Education requirements (degrees, certificates, etc)
● Advertised salary/market estimates
With additional analysis, Lightcast data can also shed light on:
● Hurdles (such as background checks and drug tests)
● Benefits (i.e., work from home, child care)
● Values (including terms like “equal opportunity employer,“ “diversity,” “family-
friendly,”fast-paced”)
1
Billion
3.5
Million
1
Million
65,000
Unique Sources
An atlas of occupations and skills
The proprietary Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy covers nearly 2,000 occupations and over 30,000 skills, allowing us to make apples-to-apples comparisons between roles, whether they’re across occupations or across nations.
How our customers use it
The Lightcast skills taxonomy creates a common language for the world of work, helping connect employers, education institutions, communities, and individuals. Students and jobseekers can use Lightcast Skills to write better resumes and discover the top skills in demand. Colleges and universities can use Lightcast Skills to design and market work-relevant programs that help students communicate their skills to potential employers. Communities can use skills to describe the talent that businesses need, the abilities that local workers have, and any gaps between the two.
Our free Open Skills tools use this data to optimize resumes and job postings, helping match skills to occupations and workers to jobs.
A curated collection for a complete view
Lightcast products also include data from government agencies, which provide a long-term view of occupations and compensation—and our tools unsupress and regionalize the data beyond what’s publicly available.
Layered together with our own collections, these dozens of sources combine past trends and future projections in order to give the greatest possible context to drive meaningful decisions. Incorporating over 18 billion data points in a simple, accessible set of tools, we provide all the data you need all in one place.
Our Analyst platform gives you accessible dashboards that deliver clarity right away. For everything from demand and salary trends to career pathways, these products provide the exact collection of data you need.
Explore Talent Analyst, Developer, and Analyst for education
Real-world career profiles
When someone shares their career history online, that offers insight into education, skills, and career trajectory. By collecting aggregated, anonymous data from millions of profiles, Lightcast tools can measure the supply of talent in a region and also provide insight into how skills and jobs develop into career pathways, enabling success and opportunity for workers.
Alumni Pathways uses real-world career profiles to show education institutions what skills and jobs their graduates have—helping schools validate existing programs and discover new opportunities.
- Skills
Skills are the basic unit and shared language of the labor market. Identifying the skills required to a job enables clear understanding of the role—much more than a job title on its own can. Our tools identify skills that workers have and employers want, classified according to the Lightcast Open Skills Library, so that you can articulate and understand your exact need and how to meet it.
- Job Posting Analytics
For over two decades, Lightcast has been a pioneer in big-data analysis of job postings from all over the internet, and this is what sets us apart. Our tools collect raw data on postings from more than 65,000 online sources, then synthesize and interpret those findings to provide meaningful insight in near real time. Job posting analytics can identify supply and demand for workers, skills, and jobs all over the world, as well as important contextual details like compensation trends.
- Traditional Labor Market Information
Government sources all over the world publish their own research and statistics on compensation, industries, occupations, education, and demographics for their populations. This data is slower and less specific than Lightcast proprietary data, but it's still useful for understanding big-picture details on the labor market.
Lightcast products include relevant government data that has been unsuppressed and enriched using our proprietary methodology to help create the most complete and comprehensive insight possible, and we synthesize international data using the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy to enable clear, standardized comparisons all over the world.
- Social Profile Data
When individuals post their resumes on the internet or build online profiles that include career information, they create an additional layer of data on skills and other relevant characteristics. That information, aggregated and anonymous, provides further detail into the supply of talent in a region, education outcomes, and career pathways. Lightcast uses this profile data to supplement our data from other sources.
Delivered via APIs
All of the data referenced above is available through tools as well as APIs. Explore our full menu of APIs and find out more about how to get direct access to these datasets, as well as our proprietary taxonomies and models.
Global in Scope
Lightcast solutions can solve problems almost anywhere you can imagine. Our database has information on over 150 countries for reference and consulting, while our global software products come ready with data on 28.
Countries use all kinds of different names and definitions to understand their own labor markets, so we solve this disparity by using our own taxonomy that unifies titles between countries and helps everyone speak the same language.
Having this broad view helps you compare markets across borders, determine where your company might expand, and understand the local skills landscape all over the world.
