Lightcast API Menu

Custom Data, Easily Accessed

Delve into our full menu of APIs and get direct access to the robust datasets powering our software solutions. With Lightcast's APIs, you have the freedom to create custom data displays and applications for your organization.

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Job Postings

Who Wants Which Workers?

The Lightcast Job Postings API provides data about the demand for US workers by showing the job postings that employers are creating. This includes both historic trends and also the most up-to-date insight possible (data updates daily).

With the Job Postings API, you can uncover a wealth of data-driven insights that revolutionize the way you navigate the job market. When you understand what employers are asking for, you gain crucial insight to fuel your strategies, refine your decision-making processes, and gain a competitive edge.

Available Region-Specific Postings:
Global Postings
UK Postings
Canada Postings

The Lightcast Job Postings API Allows You To:

Hot Trends

Unveil Job Market Trends

Dive deep into the job market's pulse. Identify emerging industries, in-demand skills, and exactly what other organizations are asking for, so that you can discover where the opportunities lie and stay ahead of the curve.

Empower Job Seekers

Empower Jobseekers

Provide jobseekers with the knowledge they need to thrive in a competitive landscape. Highlight trending skills, showcase industries with the highest demand, and empower individuals so they can stand out in the crowd.

Employer Recruitment Strategies

Create New Strategies

Uncover which companies are actively hiring, the types of job postings they prioritize, and the qualifications they seek. This allows employers to both understand the competition and refine their own workforce strategies..

Real-Time Economic Impact

Understand Economic Impact

Use the past to understand the future. See historical data on what happened during past economic shifts to understand which industries were affected, how recovery unfolded, and how job seekers and employers adapted.

Comprehensive and Reliable Data

For everyone involved with the labor market, Lightcast job posting data provides the tools you need to make data-driven decisions, seize new opportunities, and stay ahead of a dynamic world of work. Powered by our proprietary, best-in-class taxonomies, the Lightcast Job Postings API delivers the most accurate understanding of job postings on the market, delivered in the exact way you need it.



Worker Profiles

See The Supply Side

When someone uploads their resume or work experience online, that data provides helpful clues about their employers, occupations, skills, and geography. The Lightcast Profiles API aggregates, anonymizes, and standardizes that data to show what kinds of workers are doing which jobs.

Imagine the Profiles API as being on the opposite side of the coin as the Job Postings API: profiles show US supply while postings show US demand. Lightcast worker profile data allows you extract meaningful patterns and trends to help make data-driven decisions and develop targeted marketing strategies. And because it uses data workers themselves supply, these insights are more reliable than any third-party research. For a global view of worker profiles, explore here.

Classification API

Make The Data Work For You


Understanding the billions of data points associated with the labor market means organizing them in a way that makes sense to you and your organization. There are plenty of tools available—at Lightcast, we've developed our own proprietary taxonomies to help process skills, occupations, and job titles, but there are also external classification systems from government statistics agencies and other organizations.

The Classification API is your primary tool for parsing and working across the many taxonomies available in Lightcast data. It allows you to see the full view of a given taxonomy and also provides the basis for mapping data points across different taxonomies. Use it to extract and classify bodies of text using whatever system works best for your needs.


Taxonomies that are surfaced within the Classification API include: 

Benchmark Collection

Talent Benchmark API

Talent Benchmark is an all-in-one packaged API designed to deliver data on Supply, Demand, Compensation, Diversity, and Skills for a single job title in a single market.

Rather than utilize several APIs to retrieve the benchmarks most organizations want to visualize, Talent Benchmark ‘packages’ all the related Lightcast APIs into a single service that simply requires a raw job title and its city and state to retrieve one or all of the available statistics.

Talent Benchmarks combines all the following Lightcast APIs into one:

    Lightcast Titles (converts raw title to Lightcast title and SOC)

    Geography (converts City, State to Lightcast location)

    Profiles (delivers profile counts and details for matching SOC and location)

    Postings (delivers posting counts and details for matching SOC and location)

    Compensation (delivers compensation ranges for matching SOC and location)

    Core LMI (delivers diversity details for matching SOC and location)



Occupation Benchmark API

The Occupation Benchmark API leverages the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy to offer a level of granularity that goes beyond standard SOC codes.

Access a diverse array of data, from emerging skill trends to salary dynamics, across a 12-month landscape. This single API integrates data from almost a dozen datasets and models, presenting key insights on job levels, risk scores, and specialized skills. Designed for strategic decision-making, the Occupation Benchmark API provides a clear, comprehensive, and data-driven view of the employment market.

The Occupation Benchmark API allows you to explore:

    Employment and Demand Trends: Insights into current job market dynamics and future employment prospects.

    Career Pathways: Data on career advancement, lateral moves, and feeder roles across industries.

    Skills and Salary Analysis: Overview of in-demand skills and comprehensive salary metrics.

    Risk and Opportunity Assessment: Evaluation of job stability and growth potential in various locations.

Core Labor Market Information (LMI)

Government Data At Your Fingertips

The labor market statistics compiled by government statistics agencies provides a rich and historically valuable dataset to complement other data sources. We refer to this as traditional labor market information, or LMI.

The Core LMI API is Lightcast's central tool for accessing and utilizing US government labor-market data, as well as numerous non-US datasets, including the Workforce Estimation Model. This API allows a user to access various datasets which each contain different aspects of government-sourced labor market data such as data surrounding Industries, Occupations, Demographics, Education Completions, and much more. The data is aggregated from multiple government sources so you don't have to pull separate reports—then it's cleaned, enriched, and updated on a quarterly basis to give you the most up-to-date view of the labor market.

Key stories that Core LMI allows you to tell:

Skill Analytics for Employers

Occupational Trends

Government occupation data shows how the labor market has changed over time. Use the LMI API to examine how demand for certain occupations have grown or declined, identifying emerging industries or job sectors; for instance, you might look at how new tech jobs have grown in demand as traditional manufacturing has declined.

Regional Disparities

Regional Disparities

Government occupation and wage data can illustrate regional variations across employment rates, average wages, and occupational distribution. This story may highlight disparities between urban and rural regions, identify areas with specific labor market challenges, or showcase successful regional economic development strategies.

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Occupational and Wage Predictions

Use the past to understand and shape the future. By analyzing trends, skills requirements, and industry growth, you could provide insights into the jobs and skills that will be in demand in the coming years. This story can help guide individuals and policymakers in making informed decisions regarding education, training, and career choices.


Compensation and Salary


Market Salary API

The Market Salary API takes a different approach for evaluating and predicting salary metrics for occupations. It can make intelligent predictions in cases where government sourced data doesn't yet exist or isn’t granular enough.

The Market Salary API is a tool that can give you information about how much you should expect to pay for a specific role in a specific market, taking into account factors such as location, industry, education, and experience.


Compensation API

The Compensation API provides estimated salary ranges for a candidate or employee on the basis of many factors, including region, skills, and experience. The estimate is based on Lightcast’s collection of job postings with associated compensation and Lightcast’s comprehensive SOC-level earnings data, both nationally and regionally.

Modeled Collection

Career Pathways API

The Lightcast Career Pathways API provides a direct method of seeing career progression by exploring common career pathways for a specific occupation. This API makes use of a proprietary model that utilizes postings and profiles data to provide career trajectories.

Career Pathways is a model that provides insights into Next Step occupations, Feeder Occupations, and Skill Gaps between a current occupation and target occupation. It primarily utilizes the skill shapes of each occupation as well as the market salary to allow for career progression, also accounting for typical education, experience, and training requirements. 

Common use cases that can be filled through the Career Pathways API include:

    Building internal career ladders

    Recommending career growth opportunities for learners

    Assisting users in identifying the steps needed to move between opportunities.

DDN API


The DDN API (Defining, Distinguishing, and Necessary) provides direct access to skill value data as it relates to an occupation. This API can provide valuable insights on how certain skills can assist in career development and prospects. 

Here's how these three skill clusters are defined:

Defining Skills: Represents the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of the job. An employee needs these skills to qualify for and perform successfully in this occupation.

Distinguishing Skills: Advanced skills that are called for occasionally. An employee with these skills is likely more specialized and able to differentiate themselves from others in the same role.

Necessary Skills: Specialized skills required for that job and relevant across other similar jobs. An employee needs these skills as building blocks to perform the more complex Defining Skills.

The occupational skill categories enable you to see beyond recall rate (what skill is most requested for the occupation), and hone in on the skills that best describe the job, and what a person is doing in it.

For example, rather than just seeing that "communication" is one of the top skills requested in all job postings, DDN allows you to see see when communication is necessary but not sufficient to understand a role.

Viewing skills to this level of granularity and segmentation can be helpful in use cases such as:

    Help job seekers identify what are “must have” skills on their resumes to improve their chances of landing their dream jobs

    Improve your curriculum to keep it up to date with the most in-demand jobs and skills. 

    Build a core curriculum around Necessary Skills. 

    Build advanced tracks around Defining and Distinguishing Skills

    Make your students and workers more marketable by teaching them distinguishing skills

    Help students develop skills that improve their salary prospects by focusing on acquiring salary premium skills.


Projected Occupation Growth API

Lightcast Projected Occupation Growth provides an estimate of how a Lightcast Occupation is projected to grow over the next several years. This growth model incorporates information from Lightcast job postings and other historical and projection models based on BLS and OES data. This API can provide insights on a variety of factors including:

    Future Job Market Insights. Utilize the data on occupation growth to provide insights and predictions about the future job market. This can involve creating reports or articles that highlight emerging occupations and industries, projected employment trends, and the skills in demand. Such insights can be valuable for job seekers, students, career counselors, and policymakers in making informed decisions regarding education, training, and workforce planning.

    Workforce Development Initiatives. Collaborate with government agencies, educational institutions, and industry associations to design workforce development initiatives that align with the projected growth in specific occupations. These initiatives can include apprenticeship programs, vocational training, and skill-building initiatives that focus on the occupations expected to experience high demand. By equipping individuals with the right skills for future job opportunities, these initiatives can enhance workforce productivity and employability.

    Training and Education Programs. Develop targeted training and education programs based on the occupations expected to grow. These programs can help individuals acquire the skills and knowledge required for in-demand occupations. By aligning educational offerings with the projected job market, these programs can enhance workforce readiness and improve job prospects for participants.


Projected Skill Growth API

Projected Skill Growth API provides information on skill trends within the labor market. This API allows organizations to understand the projected growth of demand for a skill over the next two years.

To measure the evolution of skill requirements in the labor market, Lightcast has developed a robust and dynamic skills taxonomy based on its analysis of hundreds of millions of online job postings, resumes, and social profiles. Skill projections extend the above insights to the future, and are the most advanced, granular, and up-to-date set of skill projections that exist in the industry. The projections cover a two-year timeframe, providing organizations with a valuable perspective on anticipated skill demand and growth percentage range.


Similarity API


The Similarity API is designed to understand and find connections between different jobs, skills, and roles in the workforce. The user is able to input a role or skill, and the API provides similarities from role-to-skill, role-to-role, skill-to-role, or skill-to-skill. With the language of the labor market like a huge puzzle, the Similarity API is like a guide that knows how these pieces fit together. It analyzes countless job-related documents to figure out patterns and relationships to better understand what makes this job similar to that one.


Salary-Boosting Skills API

The Salary-Boosting Skills API returns information on key skills that can boost an employee's salary. The skills returned by this API are part of the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy, and are derived from a model which evaluates profiles and postings to find the skills most commonly associated with higher salaries. Key stories that can be told through this service include:

    Skill-Focused Career Guidance. Career guidance that uses the data to provide personalized recommendations to individuals seeking to increase their earning potential. Analyze a person's current skill set, compare it to the data on high-earning skills, and provide a roadmap for acquiring the most valuable skills in their field.

    Job Search Platforms. Incorporate data on high-earning skills and allow jobseekers to highlight their proficiency in specific skills and match them with job listings that offer higher salaries based on those skills. This would help individuals find opportunities that align with their skill set and financial goals.

    Skills Analytics for Employers. Provide companies and hiring managers with skill analytics and market insights based on the data. This would help them understand the value of specific skills in the job market and make informed decisions regarding employee compensation and skill development strategies.

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Ready to get started?

Reach out to a member of our team to discuss how Lightcast data could be integrated at your organization.