When we first looked at the monthly job postings chart for our 2024 Community Impact Report, we were struck by how it correlated with our official placement rates and wanted to go deeper with our analysis. Using our access to Lightcast, we’ve been able to better understand the changes in the job market over the past 5 years. We’ll dive into what we learned shortly, but even with access to a comprehensive data source like Lightcast, you can’t take the job posting numbers as being definitive.
The data is very good for capturing the trend and relative changes between types of roles, different geographies, etc. But - they do not capture the full picture of the available job openings. For example, some of our graduates find positions through their own networking efforts. It’s not uncommon for certain companies to try to fill positions through referrals and networking before they post the position. We also experience companies reaching out to NSS with an opportunity that has not been posted in public or is possibly posted only on their website. Those openings are generally not going to be reflected in the Lightcast database. This extends to internal “apprenticeship” programs at a few of our employer partners. Such programs may have had anywhere from a handful to several dozen openings in several of the prior years shown in the charts. Especially for the largest programs, we know that there are not individual public job postings for each of the positions filled - there may be a few postings or even no postings because the company approaches post-secondary schools directly with the opportunities.
Before we get to the new charts specific to software development and data analytics, let’s start with a refresher. The monthly job postings chart we originally shared in the Community Impact Report (Figure 1 below) shows the number of tech job postings from January 2020 to December 2024 on the national (dark blue line and scale on the left) and local (dark red and scale on the right) levels. The chart only includes job postings for the types of jobs our graduates typically land. This includes software developers, data analysts, data scientists, and related positions. It displays an overall picture of the hiring market for these roles as it includes postings for all experience levels. We’ve highlighted the last three Tennessee state fiscal years, the time period our placements rates are measured, showing the number of advertised positions that correspond to placement rates for NSS students who graduated and found work inside that block of time. (NSS is regulated by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC). They set the standards for how our placement rates are calculated.)
It’s important to remember, our placement rate is a snapshot in time. Reported outcomes are locked in as of early October, so even as students are subsequently placed, our reported stats (which by regulation are the only placement numbers we are allowed to use) are never updated to reflect the eventual final placement rate of a program. You can learn more about this in our recent blog post.
Figure 1: Monthly Job Postings Related to All NSS Bootcamps, All Experience Levels, January 2020 to December 2024
Getting back to the chart, in the state fiscal year 2021-2022 (shown in light blue), there were lots of job opportunities for our graduates, even though the number of job postings was still somewhat less than the pre-pandemic peak in the Nashville market. As a result, our students generally experienced short job search times and the overall placement rate for that year was 91.3% as of the October cut-off date.
At the beginning of state fiscal year 2022-2023 (shown in light orange), job postings began an 18 month slide. With fewer jobs available and layoffs from tech companies across the country adding to the available talent pool, we began to see job search times increase. This led to the job placement rate of 68% as of the reporting cut-off date for that year.
The downward trend in job postings continued for the first six months of the state fiscal year 2023-2024 (shown in light red) until it hit its most recent bottom in December 2023. There was a bit of job posting recovery in the first half of calendar 2024, but the number of job postings was still below the pandemic-driven low point at the end of 2020. With even fewer jobs than the prior fiscal year, our placement rate was 48% as of the reporting cut-off.
After seeing the correlation between the monthly job postings trendline and our annual placement rate, we had a few more questions. How did monthly job postings compare to our placement rates for our two areas of training, software development and data analytics? How does it compare when you look only at junior-level jobs (job postings requiring 0-2 years experience)? And now that we’re a couple months into 2025, are we still seeing the recovery (albeit slow) in the number of monthly job postings that we saw in the last half of 2024?
Before we dive into looking at those questions, there are a few differences to note about the charts below versus the original chart above:
When evaluating how many positions are available to junior-level talent such as NSS graduates, recent college graduates, etc. it’s very important to look beyond those postings that specifically ask for junior (i.e. 0-2 years of experience) candidates. Fully ⅓ of job postings in the categories we evaluated do not specify a number of years of experience. The number of job postings that don’t specify a specific level of experience far exceeds the numbers of postings for any specific level of experience. We recognize from experience that our graduates often are considered and hired for such postings, not just for those postings that explicitly ask for 0-2 years of experience. We also experience graduates securing positions where the job posting asked for more than 2 years of experience - this can happen for multiple reasons, for example, a junior data analyst with several years of experience in health care might be viewed as a good candidate by a health care company despite having less technical experience than called for in the job posting. Ok, let’s dig in.
Let’s start with software development, which includes our full-time and part-time web developer bootcamp and our software engineering program.
Figure 2: Monthly Job Postings Related to NSS’s Software Development Bootcamps, All Experience Levels, March 2020 to February 2025
Looking at software development job postings for all experience levels doesn’t change our original analysis. Monthly job postings still hit their bottom in December of 2023 and have been slowly climbing since (with the usual December low in 2024). The monthly job postings trend for July 2024 through February 2025 is a bit of a bright spot. But when you compare the lift in the chart above (Figure 2) to the lift in the chart immediately below (Figure 3), which focuses only on jobs requiring 0-2 years experience, you’ll see that the lift is mostly coming from mid- to senior-level software development positions, or positions with no experience specified. Even so, it’s still a bit of a bright spot. As we mentioned above, it wasn’t just that companies simply stopped hiring. They also laid off thousands of developers and data analysts at all experience levels. So seeing job postings continue to rise, albeit slowly, indicates that the market is starting to rehire the mid- to senior-level talent. Some of that excess intermediate level talent has to be absorbed before junior level demand can fully recover. Next week we’ll share more on how careers in software development are changing and why we’ll need more software developers, not less.
Figure 3: Monthly Job Postings Related to NSS’s Software Development Bootcamps, 0-2 Years Experience, March 2020 to February 2025
Let’s look a bit deeper at the trendline for junior-level software developer job postings. The Nashville market has seen more ups and downs in the last year and a half than the overall US market. Our software development graduates have benefited from those surges in job openings and are still getting jobs. While the trend line is more flat for junior-level positions than for all experience levels, the good news is that it’s holding steady. This slower recovery for junior software developers affirms our decision to trim cohort sizes and reduce the number of Web Development cohorts this year.
We have been responding to the job market trend for the past 15 to 18 months with reductions in the planned number of graduates that would be pursuing software development jobs. We recognized about halfway through the 2022-2023 state fiscal year (in light orange on our charts) that the slower job market might not be a temporary decline like we had seen during Covid-19 in 2020. We began to reduce the number of cohorts in some programs and to reduce class sizes. But given the lag time built into our class calendar based on the 6 to 12 month length of classes, reductions in numbers of students made in the second half of 2023 and early 2024 are only now starting to take effect since we had full cohorts already enrolled that had to reach graduation.
Our efforts to reduce market saturation for junior software developers was further exacerbated by what I can only term “bad luck”. We had been eager to launch our software engineering program in collaboration with Amazon’s ATA team - a decision that went back to the second half of 2021. Unfortunately, the graduation of the first class from this new program coincided with Amazon freezing hiring of software engineers and the concurrent layoffs across the tech sector. So at exactly the wrong time we were committed to a step function increase in the number of software developer graduates. It’s only now, in 2025, that we’re finally able to better match the number of our graduates with the job market situation we’ve seen in the past several quarters. And as the job market improves again, we’ll see the problem in reverse, as our ability to increase the number of graduates will lag an improving job market.
So what about our data analytics and data science programs?
Figure 4: Monthly Job Postings Related to NSS’s Data Bootcamps, All Experience Levels, March 2020 to February 2025
There are a couple of things that jump out in the chart above (Figure 4). First, the monthly job postings for data analysts saw a similar trendline to software developers through state fiscal year 2022-2023, but saw a stronger recovery in state fiscal year 2023-2024–a trend that appears to be continuing in the current fiscal year. And that recovery is not limited to just mid- to senior-level job postings–junior-level job postings are recovering as well (Figure 5, below). Second, despite a declining job market in the state fiscal year 2022-2023, our data graduates were able to find jobs at the same rate as our graduates the prior year, when the job market was strong. This may be because there are more jobs for data analysts than for software developers in our region. Data from the 2023 State of Middle Tennessee Tech report indicated that there were nearly twice as many people employed in the data analyst occupational category in 2022 as there were in the software developer occupational category. Our data graduates may also have access to relatively more of the positions where no experience was specified in the job posting as prior industry experience can carry more weight for junior data analysts. Finally, and as the chart shows, the Nashville job market for data analytics roles is seeing stronger recovery than the US job market.
Figure 5: Monthly Job Postings Related to NSS’s Data Bootcamps, 0-2 Years Experience, March 2020 to February 2025
Job postings for junior data analysts have had a better recovery than software developers. The drop in job postings started recovering last year, whereas software development remained flat. We’ve heard less news about layoffs impacting data positions over the past couple of years and this recovery in junior job postings may indicate that getting laid off data analysts rehired has been less of a factor.
Looking at all of this data really helps in understanding why job search times have been much longer over the past couple of years. During the current fiscal year, we’ll see more impact from our reductions in the number of students, and therefore, placeable graduates, that we started 15-18 months ago. Our team has regular communication with our active Seekers and employers and they are reporting job search activity pick up. We’re receiving more job leads from employers and our Seekers are going on more interviews. The positive signs we’re hearing from our Seekers and employers are supported by the growth of job postings shown in the charts. It’s still going to take time for the job market to recover, but we’re hopeful that the growth in job openings will continue. We’ll also speak more to why we think the number of jobs available to our graduates will continue to recover and why this is a good time to prepare to launch a tech career in our next blog post in this series.
While we can’t control when companies hire, we are introducing new ways to help our students and graduates navigate the changing job market and creating new learning opportunities for them through our ProTech initiative. You can read all about that in last week’s blog post.
Our access to the Lightcast data originally came as the result of a generous grant from the Frist Foundation which has allowed us to do a significant amount of research, digging deeper into the skills and competencies for software developers, data analysts, and related positions.