Lightcast Impact Report 2024
Unlocking New Possibilities In the Labor Market
About The Report
Lightcast helps our clients find success by seeing what others can’t, delivering unparalleled insight into real-time trends on workers, skills, and jobs. By helping communities, enterprises, and education institutions succeed, our ultimate goal is connecting individuals with the right skills and right jobs in the right places.
In our day-to-day interactions, we know how specific clients make use of our insight, but to create an overall picture of how our clients use Lightcast data to create an impact in their own organizations, we needed something more comprehensive—and that's why we wrote this Impact Report. It provides a clear and centralized collection showcasing the powerful work our clients and researchers have been able to accomplish with Lightcast data. Here are the highlights:
Four Key Themes
Serving Diverse and Underrepresented Groups
By illuminating systemic biases and gaps in hiring and promotion, we can help create a labor market that works for everyone.
Efficient, Data-Driven Decision Making
Lightcast delivers trusted data that our clients can use with confidence to support and establish a future-ready workforce.
Connectivity within and across Groups
Reliable data creates a shared language that leads to new connections. Lightcast clients are integrating labor market data across their entire organizations.
Upskilling, Reskilling, and Skills-Alignment
Skills are the fundamental, base unit of the labor market, allowing everyone to articulate what they can provide and what they need.
Serving Diverse and Underrepresented Groups
For the labor market to work as efficiently and fairly as possible, it needs to eliminate barriers and maximize the opportunities for everyone involved at all levels. Nowhere is this more important than in the way we help our clients serve diverse and historically marginalized populations.
Lightcast data provides insights into workforce composition, hiring trends, pay disparities, and career progression. Our analytics highlight areas where diversity is lacking and inequities exist, and this enables our clients to address those gaps.
Te Ao Māori
It’s impossible to understand New Zealand without understanding Māori culture and its relationship to the nation’s history. Increasingly, Lightcast data has shown that significance is showing up in the workforce and shaping the way business is done. This shift reflects a broader societal acknowledgment of the importance of Māori culture and rights in New Zealand’s national identity.
The Indigenous social innovation lab Tokona te Raki found a staggering 755% increase in demand for skills related to “te ao Māori” —the Māori world— in job postings from 2014 to 2023, and the Lightcast office in Christchurch supported the lab’s analysis and use of the Labour Insight platform. Te ao Māori encompassess knowledge of the Māori language (te reo Māori), Māori customs and practices (Tikanga), and an understanding of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi signed between the Māori and the British (Te Tiriti). The demand for Tikanga skills experienced the highest growth, rising 1085%.
The Weight of Words
If job postings are written in a way that’s biased toward men, they are inherently unfair to women.
Lightcast data captures the exact language used in postings, including a measure of how many masculine- and feminine-coded words they use. UNESCO compared that usage to employment data revealing how they’re related—and what that means for women in the labor market.
Efficient, Data-Driven Decision Making
Better data enables better decisions. The clear insight we provide empowers and enables the organizations we work with to improve efficiency, growth, and future-readiness, both for themselves and for those they serve. Without Lightcast data, our clients might rely on hunches, anecdotes, or “conventional wisdom” about how to serve their markets, students, or regions, leaving them blind to external realities of the labor market. Lightcast removes that ambiguity and provides clarity.
In the survey conducted in conjunction with this report, clients indicate that Lightcast data and products have been influential in making better decisions.
The Demographic Drought
Even before the acute labor market shortage of the past several years, Lightcast experts had been sounding the alarm about the population and workforce trends shaping what we call “The Demographic Drought.”
Homing in on this, in partnership with Presbyterian Homes and Services, The Minnesota Business Partnership, and SullivanCotter, Lightcast produced a Demographic Drought report specific to Minnesota. The report discovers the total US labor force returned to its pre-pandemic level in August 2020, but as of June 2023, Minnesota still needs 23,000 more people in the labor force to get back to its February 2020 level.
By understanding the overall shape of the demographic drought, and especially the nuances particular to Minnesota, state leaders in business, education, and government are in a better position to address these challenges in the coming years.
Connectivity within and across Groups
Lightcast insight provides a shared language that creates meaningful connections between different groups in the labor market, and even between different teams within the same organization. Businesses, education institutions, and communities all need labor market data, and by serving each of these groups, we can also facilitate new connections between them.
Two thirds (66%) of clients overall indicated that Lightcast products help them integrate labor market data into organization-wide processes, and a majority report an increase in work-based learning opportunities, building new bridges between schooling and the workforce.
“HR Professionals are the silent heroes. They labor every day trying to figure out the right job for the right person. If we can do the right research with the right data and the right partners, we can help those HR professionals do their job better, and take care of all these employees in the world, making it a slightly better place. Lightcast helps us do that.”
All in on Skills: Upskilling, Reskilling, and Skills-Alignment
Skills are the fundamental, base unit of the labor market, allowing everyone involved in it to articulate exactly what they can provide and what they need. A skills-based approach opens the door to new insight into supply and demand about people and jobs—both across the market and within an organization.
Across all business units, our survey respondents reported an increase in individuals having more skills better aligned with labor market demand, leading to well-paying jobs.
“Skills provide a shared language that can expand opportunity for all workers. Using this common language, employers can identify exactly what they need and workers can articulate exactly what they offer. In practice, this means that strategies like skill-based hiring, which focus on skills rather than degrees, can help expand the supply of available talent and help maximize efficiency so everyone can succeed.”
Conclusion
When the labor market doesn’t work, companies can’t find talent, and people can’t find opportunities. Learning providers need to see the future of work today in order to prepare the leaders of tomorrow. Businesses need a strategy to grow and stay ahead of the curve in a fast-paced world. Community leaders need alignment to create opportunities and prosperity for their region.
By using our data to create connections between these groups, we enable better, faster decisions, help our clients serve diverse and underrepresented groups, and use skills to deliver clarity and unlock new potential.
People are at the heart of everything we do, and our data powers research, innovation, and growth all over the globe at the highest levels of government, business, and education. And we’re here to help navigate them: our job is to illuminate the exact solution our customers need to make a difference—nothing more, nothing less.
When the right people have the right jobs, companies succeed, communities thrive, and educators can empower new generations with unlimited possibilities. Lightcast delivers solutions for all three sectors, so that together, we can create a job market that works for everyone.
Explore The Full Report
There's more to explore. The full Impact Report dives deeper into each of these four themes, with more research highlights, case studies, and client survey results showing how Lightcast is accomplishing its mission by helping others accomplish theirs.
Methodology: FDR Group served as our research partner for the survey data. Their methodology for this project is avaliable here.