One of the biggest mistakes people make is treating career decisions like they happen in a vacuum. They pick a major out of passion, chase a job title, or apply for grad school without ever looking at what the market is doing.
If you want to make smarter choices, you need context. Who’s hiring, which industries are growing or shrinking, and which skills are gaining or losing demand.
Here’s a quick test: how many of these do you know?
- Employment Situation Report (monthly, first Friday): hires, layoffs, and wages
- JOLTS (monthly, end of month): job openings, quits, and layoffs by industry
- Inflation data (CPI): rising costs usually mean tighter hiring
- Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI): whether businesses are expanding or pulling back
- LinkedIn Workforce Reports: roles and locations trending up or down
- Glassdoor Job Market Report: hiring trends, pay data, and real-time sentiment from workers
- Job postings: the skills that repeat are the ones in demand
- LinkedIn Skills Insights + WEF Future of Jobs Report: skills rising vs fading
- NACE reports: what grads are paid, which majors have traction, and which internships lead to jobs
If most of these don’t ring a bell, you’re probably making career decisions off vibes. And I get it. Most of this stuff is buried in 20-page PDFs or written in economist-speak.
The average person is a job market midwit. Normal people don’t have the time to track all this. The only reason I do is because I run GradSimple. My version of doom-scrolling isn’t TikTok, it’s economist tweets, government PDFs, and labor market data most people (with lives) would never touch.
But what if you don’t need to track all this yourself? What if you could get the why don’t you explain this like I’m five, TL;DR version instead?
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