History
2024: Lightcast becomes a Workday Certified Partner and joins the Snowflake Marketplace, allowing for seamless integration between its own data and customers’ existing solutions.
2024: Lightcast acquires data visualization firm eIMPACT, which provides customizable, public-facing dashboards.
2023: Lightcast continues to grow with three acquisitions: Montreal-based, AI-powered business intelligence firm Gazelle. And two survey organizations NACM and Embark, both of which identify the paths college alumni take after graduation.
2022: The combined organization rebrands to Lightcast, with a refined mission: to unlock new possibilities in the labor market.
2021: Burning Glass Institute was created, separate and not connected to Lightcast, as a nonprofit think tank geared toward academic and policy research using Lightcast data.
2021: The company combines Labor Insight into Analyst to create the world’s most comprehensive software platform for labor market data.
2021: KKR purchases Emsi and merges it with Burning Glass Technologies to be known as Emsi Burning Glass.
2021: Emsi launches a tool designed to help colleges and universities discover how the skills they teach align with the skills employers want. Emsi Titles also launches, starting with over 39 million raw titles and narrowing them down to under 100,000.
2019: Open Skills launches, the first step in creating a shared language across the labor market for a skills-based approach.
2019: Leading global investment firm KKR acquires a major stake in Burning Glass Technologies.
2018: Milan-based firm Tabulaex is acquired by Burning Glass, expanding its access to job postings throughout Europe, covering an additional 11 countries.
2017: Emsi deploys Alumni Outcomes so that colleges and universities can better track their students’ career success after graduation.
2017: Burning Glass launches its APIs, allowing customers to more easily apply career-focused data to their own products and workflows. It also releases Program Insight, a real-time data tool to analyze demand for educational programs.
2014: The Burning Glass occupations taxonomy launches, including 1,000 occupations. Specialized occupations (of 2,000) came in 2016.
2013: Burning Glass begins operations in the Asia-Pacific region, based out of New Zealand.
2012: Emsi establishes a presence in the UK. The same year, it begins unsuppressing data from the Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce Indicators, allowing new data on demographics, race, and ethnicity by industry.
2012: Burning Glass begins operations in the UK.
2011: Burning Glass launches Labor Insight, providing customers a robust database of job postings for real-time labor market analysis. The company also releases the first version of its skills taxonomy.Â
2008: Amid the Great Recession and high unemployment, Emsi creates Job Finder to help students plan their education and career using data, which becomes the foundation for Career Coach.
2008: The Focus platform is launched, which is designed to help Departments of Labor address unemployment (beginning with its first client, the New York State DOL). The same year, Burning Glass acquires EmployOn and launches its job feed services.
2007: Emsi releases applications based on unsuppressed federal data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
2004: Burning Glass introduces its flagship product LENS, which uses natural language processing to parse resumes and job postings and match them to each other.
2003: Emsi releases the Community College Strategic Planner, an all-in-one software platform that was the precursor to Analyst.
2002: Checktronix is founded, incorporating both US and India operations for Burning Glass.
2001: Kjell Christophersen and Hank Robison found Emsi (Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc.) as a subsidiary of CCbenefits Inc., and release the company’s first report: the Socioeconomic Impact Study (now known as the Economic Impact Study)
1990s: University of Idaho professors Kjell Christophersen and Hank Robison meet and design a model to express the economic impact colleges and universities have on their communities.
1999: Burning Glass Technologies is founded to help HR recruiters make better hiring decisions, using AI to analyze resumes and predict the best candidate for a position based on skills, work history, and education.