Labor market and workforce data

What is Lightcast?

Lightcast is a labor market intelligence company that combines real time job posting signals with authoritative government and administrative data to track how people, jobs, and skills move together. Lightcast has worked with colleges, universities, and research institutions for more than 26 years, and on Dewey that same intelligence is organized into four datasets researchers can work with directly, plus two additional datasets that came into the Lightcast family through its acquisition of Rhetorik.

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What academic researchers should know about Lightcast labor market data

Lightcast on Dewey spans workforce and labor market data at the occupation and industry level, economic and regional data including regional output, cost of living, and commuting patterns, population and demographic data, and education and postsecondary outcomes data covering enrollments, completions, and tuition. It also includes company and office data, formerly published under the Rhetorik name, covering firm attributes and technology footprint down to individual office locations. Coverage draws on decades of standardized government and administrative sources alongside continuously updated job postings.

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Why academic researchers choose Lightcast on Dewey

Lightcast's strength is standardization: messy job postings, government statistics, and administrative records are cleaned and mapped into a consistent occupation, industry, and geography structure so researchers can compare across regions without doing that work themselves. Its former Rhetorik data extends that same discipline to private firms and multisite organizations that public company data typically misses. Lightcast pairs well with other Dewey partners including LinkUp for job postings, WageScape for wage data, People Data Labs for company workforce insights, and ATTOM or Veridion for property and firmographic context.

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Lightcast academic research ideas and use cases

Occupational demand and regional economic conditions. Researchers can pair Lightcast occupation data with its regional economic indicators to examine how job demand shifts alongside output and cost of living across cities and states. A liberal arts college used refreshed Lightcast job postings data to complete an ongoing labor market study, evidence that this data supports work at institutions of any size.

Skills demand and emerging occupations. Lightcast's occupation and industry detail captures the rise in demand for artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and analytics roles as they emerge inside existing job categories. A business school in India used Lightcast data to study hiring demand in these emerging fields, and the same approach extends to any occupation undergoing rapid skills change.

Education to employment pipelines. Enrollment and completion data can be connected with Lightcast's population and demographic detail to ask how educational attainment tracks with local labor market conditions. This pairing is well suited to dissertations and grant funded work tracing outcomes from campus to career.

Workforce composition at large employers. Occupation-level job posting data can be combined with Lightcast's professional profile and company intelligence data to connect hiring demand with the people and companies driving it. A European university used Lightcast job postings data to study hiring patterns among large employers as part of a grant funded initiative.

Regional labor markets and commuting patterns. Lightcast's economic and demographic data together support studies of commuting flows, cost of living differences, and labor force participation across metro areas, a common starting point for teams spanning economics, sociology, and public policy.

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