The job market is getting easier for those looking in a new industry, as a recent report found that only 30% of job postings now require multiple years of experience to be considered.
Finding a job that fits your particularly needs in 2024 is anything but easy. Between remote positions, 4-day work week roles, and AI jobs are out there, but finding the ones that align with your experience can make the entire process quite a chore.
Fortunately, the tide seems to be changing a bit, as this new report shows that, year-on-year, experience is less important to businesses looking to fill positions.
Experience No Longer Required for More Jobs
According to a report from The Hiring Lab — the research arm of popular job posting site Indeed — only 30% of job listings on the site listed experience required data in their postings. This is quite a big decline, considering the number sat at 40% in April 2022.
The new trend isn’t just limited to a specific type of job, either. In fact, the report — titled Experience the Difference: Why Employers Are Relaxing Some Tenure Requirements —found that it was most common for positions that “both pay more and require more education.”
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Even more notable, job listings with experience requirements are falling in all thresholds, so whether you’re trying to find a job that previously had 1-year, 2-year, or even 5-year experience requirements, you could still land it with none.
Which Industries Have the Most Requirements?
While job listings with experience requirements are definitely on the decline, it varies pretty substantially from industry to industry. Subsequently, finding a job that is open to skills-based hiring might be more difficult depending on where you’re looking.
The data from The Hiring Lab found that the industries with the most job postings requiring experience are project management (49.3%), accounting (47.4%), and civil engineering (47.1%).
Conversely, the industries with the least job postings requiring experience are beauty & wellness (15.8%), pharmacy (19.8%), and therapy (20.7%).
Why Are Job Requirements Disappearing From Listings?
With job experience requirements disappearing from listings across the Indeed platform, it’s understandable to wonder why this is happening and how it might impact job seekers in 2024. Well, the author of the report had a few thoughts on this potential emerging trend:
“Many factors may be influencing the recent decline in years’ experience requirements, but a few stood out in this analysis. First, there are clear differences in how occupational sectors leverage experience requirements and how many years’ experience they typically ask for. Second, employers and workers seem to be responding to labor market conditions and a potential shift toward skills-first hiring practices.” – Cory Stahle, economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab
All that to say, the door seems to be opening a bit for job seekers without experience to break into a new industry if they have the skills to pull it off. Because given the trend, we could see job requirements completely vanishing from listings in just a few years.
