Lightcast is a labor market analytics company that collects and analyzes data on jobs, skills, and workforce trends. Formed from the 2021 merger of two established firms, Emsi and Burning Glass Technologies, and rebranded under the Lightcast name in 2022, the company provides intelligence that employers, educators, economic developers, and governments use to understand what’s happening in the job market.
How Lightcast Was Formed
Lightcast has roots in two companies that spent decades building labor market tools from different angles. Burning Glass Technologies was founded in 1999 to help HR recruiters make better hiring decisions, using AI to analyze resumes and predict the best candidate for a position based on skills, work history, and education. Emsi (Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc.) launched in 2001 as a subsidiary focused on economic modeling and regional labor data.
In 2021, the private equity firm KKR purchased Emsi and merged it with Burning Glass Technologies. The combined company initially went by Emsi Burning Glass, then rebranded to Lightcast in 2022 with a stated mission to “unlock new possibilities in the labor market.” That merger brought together Burning Glass’s job posting analytics with Emsi’s economic modeling tools, creating what the company describes as the most comprehensive software platform for labor market data.
What Lightcast Actually Does
At its core, Lightcast collects enormous amounts of job market data and turns it into usable intelligence. Its technology scrapes job postings from employer websites, job boards, aggregators, and government sites across the internet. Once collected, those postings are parsed and coded to extract dozens of data elements: job titles (mapped to standardized occupations), employers (mapped to industry codes), required skills, educational credentials, certifications, experience levels, work activities, salary information, number of openings, and job type.
This processed data feeds into products that different types of customers use in different ways. Employers use Lightcast to understand what skills are in demand, what competitors are paying, and where talent shortages exist. Colleges and universities use it to align their programs with the skills employers actually want. Economic development organizations use it to attract businesses by showing them local workforce strengths. Government agencies use it to guide workforce policy and training investments.
The Skills Taxonomy
One of Lightcast’s most widely used tools is its open skills taxonomy, a standardized library of over 34,000 skills drawn from real-world job postings and professional profiles, then refined by in-house experts. Each skill has a unique machine-readable identifier, which means different organizations can use the same language when talking about workforce capabilities.
The taxonomy organizes skills into categories and subcategories. Categories represent broad areas of expertise that map to career areas, while subcategories group the specific skills needed to perform particular aspects of a job. This hierarchy makes it possible to compare skills across datasets, organizations, industries, and geographies.
Lightcast also offers parsing tools that can scan text (job postings, resumes, course syllabi) and automatically identify skills within it. This is useful for employers trying to write better job descriptions, HR teams building internal skills inventories, or universities evaluating whether their curriculum covers the competencies employers are hiring for.
Who Uses Lightcast
Lightcast’s customer base spans several sectors. Large employers and staffing firms use it for talent strategy: figuring out where to open offices, how to price roles competitively, or which skills to prioritize in hiring and training. Higher education institutions are a major customer segment, using the data to justify new degree programs, demonstrate graduate outcomes, or identify gaps between what they teach and what the labor market demands.
Workforce development boards and government agencies rely on Lightcast data to allocate training dollars and identify which industries are growing or declining in their regions. Economic development organizations use it to pitch their regions to companies considering relocation or expansion, showing available talent pipelines and wage benchmarks.
How the Data Gets Used in Practice
If you’ve encountered Lightcast without knowing it, it was likely through a tool built on top of their data. Many university career centers use Lightcast-powered dashboards to show students which jobs are growing and what they pay. Some job boards and career planning platforms license Lightcast data to power salary estimates or skills gap analyses. When a state governor’s office announces a workforce initiative targeting a specific industry, the underlying labor market analysis often comes from Lightcast or similar providers.
The company also publishes its own research and analysis on labor market trends. Its economists regularly produce reports on topics like remote work patterns, AI’s impact on hiring, wage growth in specific sectors, and projected labor shortages. One of its recent analyses estimated a deficit of 6 million people in the U.S. labor force within the next decade, a figure that underscores why workforce planning tools have become increasingly valuable to organizations trying to hire in a tightening market.
Lightcast’s Role in the Broader Market
Lightcast operates in a growing category sometimes called “talent intelligence” or “workforce analytics.” The basic idea is that traditional government labor statistics, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment reports, are valuable but slow. They’re published monthly or quarterly, rely on surveys, and categorize jobs using occupation codes that don’t always capture the granularity of modern work. Lightcast supplements that by analyzing millions of real-time job postings, offering a more current and detailed picture of what employers are actually asking for.
That real-time dimension is particularly useful during periods of rapid change. When employers suddenly started requiring AI skills in job postings, or when remote work listings surged during the pandemic, Lightcast’s data captured those shifts months before they showed up in official government statistics. The tradeoff is that job posting data reflects employer intent rather than actual hires, so it’s a leading indicator of demand rather than a definitive count of employment.