Revelio Labs economists have written about many parts of the labor market over the years, including what a degree is worth, which companies promote their own people, and who leaves after an acquisition.
Each piece develops a deep economic perspective on one important question. Taken together, though, they cover many of the decisions people make over an entire career, and they show how much those decisions depend on conditions outside any one worker’s control.
So we thought it would be interesting to walk through that research in the order most careers unfold, and highlight our economists' weekly workforce research.
A high school diploma pays less on average, with wide variation
For many people, the first career decision is whether to go to college. In our job postings data, roles that require only a high school diploma list an average salary of $48.8K. Roles that require a post-secondary degree list $88.8K.
The averages leave out a lot. When we looked at the highest paying jobs for high school graduates, sales, trade, and medical roles paid $10K to $20K above the high school average. Postings that asked for military or nursing skills also paid well.
Location also matters a lot. Midwestern and Southern states offered high school graduates the most openings and the highest salaries.
Computer science enrollment has peaked
Students who go to college are changing what they study, and computer science shows the shift most clearly.
CS enrollments doubled and then tripled at schools across the country as tech firms competed for new graduates. Our data shows the major peaking with the class of 2026, at nearly 11% of student profiles. Later classes are moving elsewhere:
- Finance has already passed CS
- Mechanical and industrial engineering, flat at about 3% for years, reach nearly 7% in the class of 2029
- The starting salary premium for CS graduates is converging with other STEM fields
Students appear to be responding to what the market is telling them. We laid out the full trend in computer science has hit its high water mark. For the tech roles that remain, our research on tech hiring getting more specialized tracks how skill requirements in postings have changed.
More economics PhDs are starting their careers in tech
The same movement shows up at the top of the education ladder. Our economics team probably has a personal interest in this one, since many of us came through these programs!
When we looked at what an economics PhD opens up, the traditional paths had narrowed. More graduates of US programs are taking temporary postdocs before the tenure track, and fewer went into policy roles in 2025.
Tech has taken in many of them. More than 40% of 2025 graduates who entered the private sector started at technology companies, and Amazon has hired over 200 PhD economists since 2017.
Few people list their degree in their name, and those who do earn less
Maybe a smaller question, but one people often ask with any advanced degree: whether to show it next to your name.
Only 3.5% of graduate degree holders do this on their professional profiles. MDs (14%) and PhDs (10%) are the most likely to.
Our data suggests the practice may not send the intended message:
- PhD and MBA holders who list the degree rank 7.4 percentiles lower on our prestige measure, which reflects both schools and employers
- MBA holders who list it earn 16.7% less on average
School prestige explains part of the difference, but the gap persists among graduates of the same institutions. More detail is in listing your degree in your name may not signal what you think.
AI certifications now make up nearly 30% of professional credentials
And we do research on more than traditional academic achievements. The fastest-growing credential of the last few years has nothing to do with a degree. From 2018 to 2023, AI certifications made up 1% to 2% of all professional certifications. By 2026, the share was nearly 30%.
In our analysis of whether AI certifications are worth it, workers who earned one were more likely in their next job transition to:
- Change occupations
- Earn a promotion
- Move to a new employer, at a higher salary than job switchers without a certification
High earners are more likely to get certified, so part of that advantage likely reflects who chooses to upskill.
Women make up a majority of entry-level hires, driven by which industries are hiring
Entry-level hiring has narrowed as the labor market slows and AI adoption grows. About 9.2% of young workers are unemployed.
The roles still being filled are not split evenly. In 2025, women made up 54% of entry-level hires, about four percentage points above their share of the workforce.
Education accounts for very little of the gap. Industry mix accounts for much more. Healthcare, HR, hospitality, and retail make up more than half of entry-level postings, and all of them lean female.
At higher pay levels, the pattern reverses. Men remain overrepresented in entry-level roles paying more than $75K, particularly in engineering and finance. The full analysis covers whether women are getting hired more than men.
Fewer than half of job postings lead to a hire
Job seekers also deal with postings that never turn into jobs.
In a collaboration with Bloomberg, we matched job postings to new hires at the same company, role, seniority, and state. We found:
- Hires per posting fell from 0.75 in 2018 to below 0.5 in 2023
- Mentions of recruiter ghosting in interview reviews rose 120% over the same period
Labor shortages explain some of the decline in fields like healthcare and construction. They do little to explain it in management and finance. Our research on ghost job postings concludes that postings alone give an incomplete read on hiring demand.
Costco keeps its workers while Walmart loses store managers
After someone is hired, the employer shapes much of what follows. Retail shows just how wide the range can be.
Costco has repeatedly been named one of the best companies to work for, and the workforce data is consistent with that reputation. It has grown steadily with very little attrition, which is uncommon in retail. Our look at what makes Costco a great place to work points to two factors: a flat structure with many junior employees for each senior one, and steady hiring of college graduates while competitors hired fewer.
Walmart’s store manager numbers look very different:
- Store manager attrition is 29.3%, compared with a 23.2% average at Target, Kroger, and Home Depot
- Walmart managers oversee more employees than their counterparts at any competitor, without the highest pay
- About 75% are promoted from within
Those managers also stay longer than peers elsewhere, so each departure costs Walmart more. That helps explain Walmart’s high turnover rate and why total pay for the role can reach $400K.
Spirit Halloween hires a new workforce every year
Some jobs are short by design. Spirit Halloween begins posting seasonal roles as early as April. Average tenure is 4.7 months, less than half the 11.0-month average at competitors such as Walmart and Target. About 88% of former employees do not return for another season, and employee reviews frequently mention low pay and long hours.
The details are in our look at Spirit Halloween’s seasonal hiring.
Some companies promote from within far more than others
Over a longer career, it matters whether an employer develops its own people.
When we studied which companies promote from within, Target, Caterpillar, and ExxonMobil had high shares of internally promoted senior staff. Apple, Google, and AWS were among the tech companies with lower shares.
An employer can also help after someone leaves. In our ranking of the most powerful corporate alumni networks, McKinsey led in the share of former employees who went on to senior roles at other companies. Big Four alumni most often moved into senior management at Citi, JPMorgan, and Microsoft.
A company’s promotion rate affects your odds of moving up
Internal promotion matters more when changing employers gets harder, as it does in the current market. Promotion rates across the S&P 500 rose during the 2021 to 2022 hiring surge and have declined since.
Firms differ a great deal. Some promote 10 to 12 employees per 100 each year. Others promote 1 to 3. The gap holds even among companies of similar size.
Promotions also tend to come early in a role, and workers promoted before are much more likely to be promoted again. After accounting for role, industry, pay, seniority, and promotion history, a one-standard-deviation increase in a company’s promotion intensity raises the probability of promotion by about 1.2 percentage points.
Gen Z changes employers far more often than earlier generations
Many younger workers move up by leaving. In our data, Baby Boomers worked at an average of 3.6 companies over 27.1 years of employment after age 21. Gen Z has already worked at 2.7 companies in 2.8 years.
Older workers may leave early jobs off their profiles, so the real gap is probably somewhat smaller. We see Gen Z job hopping as a practical response to a less stable labor market. Consulting firms and mission-driven organizations like Teach For America keep Gen Z workers the longest.
Junior roles are shrinking in banking and call centers
Some of the largest changes to a career come from outside the company. AI draws the most attention, and our research finds its effects concentrated in particular parts of the job ladder.
At US banks, junior roles are 4.7% below their October 2022 level, while senior roles have kept growing at about their pre-ChatGPT pace. The decline is sharpest in commercial and retail banking. Banks have long trained future leaders through junior analyst roles, and our data suggests banks are losing interest in junior talent as they restructure around AI.
Call centers show similar pressure worldwide. For more than a decade, they were one of the most dependable entry points into office work in middle- and lower-income countries. Global call center headcount is now 5.3% below its December 2023 peak.
The recent decline is unusual. Of the 70 quarter-end readings since 2009, headcount fell from a year earlier only eight times, and all eight came in the last eight quarters. Our research covers why global call center employment is shrinking.
US multinationals have grown their offshore workforce faster than their domestic one
Offshoring predates AI and affects many of the same remote-friendly roles. Among US-headquartered multinationals, offshore employment grew 32% from 2019, while onshore employment grew 16.7%.
Our research with Aaron Sojourner and Elton Mykerezi shows American companies offshoring high-paying, remote-friendly jobs in particular.
Acquisitions and private equity deals raise attrition
A change in ownership can affect a workforce as much as a new technology. Eighteen months after an acquisition, about 18% of employees at the acquired company no longer work for the parent. Recruiting, marketing, entry-level, and executive roles see the largest effects.
Results vary by deal type. In our research on layoffs after an acquisition, cross-industry acquisitions grew headcount at three times the rate of same-industry acquisitions five years later.
Private equity acquisitions follow a distinct pattern. In the year after the deal:
- Attrition rises sharply, especially in high-paying roles and support functions
- Most replacement roles are posted at lower salaries
- Employee sentiment falls and stays lower longer than after a typical mass layoff
Our research on what happens to employees when private equity buys a company covers each of these effects.
Corporate DEI headcount is down about 15% from its peak
Whole functions can expand and contract with the business climate. Corporate DEI teams grew quickly after 2020. By 2022, demand for DEI roles was falling faster than for nearly any other function. Among Russell 3000 companies, DEI headcount is about 15% below its mid-2022 peak.
We covered the rise and fall of DEI in corporate America, including what happened to the people in those roles.
Job growth remains slow but positive
All of these career decisions happen within the broader labor market. We track it through Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS), a free, monthly release of US labor market statistics published the day before the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report.
According to the latest jobs report, the US economy added 26k jobs in October 2026. The hiring rate has stabilized, attrition ticked up slightly, and job postings continued a slow rebound. In September, the economy added 56.9k jobs.
Healthcare has carried employment growth
Hiring across the economy has fallen since 2023, and retail, leisure, and manufacturing have lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Healthcare and social assistance have added jobs in every monthly RPLS release, keeping total employment from declining.
Our research asks whether healthcare job growth can keep propping up the labor market.
Recession proof jobs tend to pay less and offer less mobility
Many of the same essential roles appear in our research on recession proof jobs. US job postings have fallen nearly 60% since January 2022, while demand for delivery workers, care aides, therapists, and nurses grew.
Those roles are stable for a reason, and the stability comes with limits:
- The highest-paying occupations have the most volatile demand
- Three of every four postings in the most resilient occupations are staff-level roles with limited room to advance
More workers are adding a side hustle
Limited pay and mobility in stable jobs help explain why more people hold a second one. The share of US professional profiles reporting a side hustle as a freelancer is 20% higher than in 2019. Our research on side hustles for women found women leading that increase.
Safety-sensitive jobs are part of the trend too. The share of commercial pilots with a side hustle (imagine that!) has risen from about 6% to nearly 10% since 2008. It grew fastest early in the pandemic and stayed elevated after air travel recovered. Pilots who side hustle tend to choose flexible fields like real estate and entrepreneurship, a pattern we examined with Business Insider in our research on side hustles for pilots.
A career depends on conditions that can be measured
Most of this research started with a narrow question about one company, one degree, or one occupation. Read together, it shows how much of a career depends on conditions people rarely see when they make a decision. How often an employer promotes, which industries are doing the hiring, what happens after a change in ownership, and how new technology affects entry-level work all shape outcomes as much as individual choices do.
Each of those conditions shows up in workforce data. Our economists will keep tracking them as the labor market changes, and the full archive is on our research page.