Young adults and adult career-changers: Want to get trained and get working? If your highest priority is getting to work quickly, search this page to find jobs that are growing in Chicagoland.  Getting trained in these careers could mean finding employment more rapidly than other fields.

Guides, counselors, mentors, and community-based organizations: Working with someone who needs to get to work quickly and is open to exploring different careers?  Use this page to find jobs that are growing in Chicagoland and training opportunities that prepare people for those positions.

Career pathways program providers: Wondering if your programming is in line with the labor market? Use the Hot Jobs page to understand up-to-date regional labor market information and inform decisions you make about your programs.

Funders: Want to better understand the connections, opportunities, and gaps between employment training programs and the Chicagoland labor market? Explore this page to see which careers are growing and the training programs associated with them.

At Chicagoland CareerPathways, we want to make the process of discovering a post-secondary path as easy, rewarding, and enjoyable as possible. To help our users (you!) discover programs and paths to in-demand careers that are not only surviving, but thriving, we created this Hot Jobs list.

While there are many different resources out there that list high-demand jobs, ours is the first resource that focuses specifically on Chicagoland, only lists jobs that do not require a four-year degree, and is updated every month. This helps you make the most of your search.

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“High-demand” refers to an occupation that saw month-to-month growth of at least 60 new job postings in the Chicagoland area in at least one of the last three months. In other words, this job has plenty of available openings.

“High-opportunity” refers to an occupation that saw, over the last three months, a higher number of total new job openings than total job seekers associated with the occupation. Based on our data, there were more positions opening up than there were people able to fill them.

“Low-barrier” refers to an occupation that does not require a four-year degree. An individual can become qualified for this occupation through a two-year degree, certificate program, bootcamp, apprenticeship, or on-the-job training.

“Well paid” refers to an occupation that pays a median wage of $15 per hour or more. This is not to be confused with entry-level wage, which may fall below the $15 per hour threshold. We acknowledge that living wage can look very different based on geographic location, household size, medical needs, and many other factors, and understand that this $15 per hour wage does not constitute a living wage for every individual. We consider $15 per hour to be a minimum standard.

It is important to note that one occupation, Nursing Assistant, does not meet the well paid criterion. We decided to include it, however, as the Nursing Assistant occupation often serves as an entry point into the Registered Nurse pathway, which does meet the well paid criterion.

Data on new job openings and job seekers is taken from Illinois JobLink Reports. Our data looks at entries in the JobLink system that are listed under both available Job Order Types and located in Cook – Chicago. Reports for both one- and three-month periods are collected through JobLink.

Information on education and training needed is taken from a combination of data sources, including but not necessarily limited to O*NET OnLine, CareerOneStop, and the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. Industry- and occupation-specific resources are sometimes consulted for titles with ambiguous or conflicting information between these three main sources.

Wage data comes from the Illinois Department of Employment Security. The data used for Hot Jobs is listed under Economic Development Region 4 (Northeast).

We recognize that the data used to calculate our Hot Jobs list is not perfectly accurate (and that there is perhaps no labor market information dataset that can be called perfectly accurate), but we believe that it gives us an overview of the labor market that is statistically sufficient for our purposes.

Please remember that our Hot Jobs list is just one resource among many that can and should be used to help inform decision-making. If you would like more information, please send us an email via our contact page.