Education Insights
Empowering Education with Labor-Market Intelligence
In today’s rapidly evolving knowledge economy, educational institutions and learner-focused organizations must stay closely aligned with real employer demand and labor-market trends. When programs are built around up-to-date workforce insights, institutions strengthen regional economies, improve learner outcomes, and create pathways to meaningful career opportunities.
Lightcast APIs make that alignment possible. With clear labor-market insights, skills intelligence, and demand data, you can build market-ready programs and guide learners toward careers that support long-term growth and prosperity.
1. Employer Demand
Understanding employer demand is central to developing programs that lead to meaningful employment. Our Lightcast APIs give you access to real-time job market insights as well as forward-looking projections.
Key employer demand APIs
| APIs | Description |
|---|---|
| Job Postings API | Track real-time job postings, including required skills, certifications, and job titles. |
| Projected Occupation Growth & Projected Skill Growth | Identify which occupations and skills are expected to grow over the next decade. |
| Core LMI API & Market Salary API | Analyze wages and salary trends by occupation, industry, region, or level of experience. |
| Skills API | Prioritize skills by importance and identify the capabilities that differentiate top graduates. |
These insights help institutions understand where employer needs are emerging, declining, or accelerating and how to respond strategically.
2. Education
With labor-market demand as a foundation, educators can design and evaluate programs that meet real workforce needs.
Lightcast APIs enables
- Program Evaluation and Market Alignment
- Skill Tagging and Curriculum Mapping
- Clear Program-to-Career Pathways
These capabilities help institutions improve program quality, support accreditation processes, and drive enrollment through transparent outcomes.
3. Learner Potential
Traditional learners or career-switchers need actionable information to make confident decisions. Lightcast APIs support personalized and data-driven guidance.
Key learner-focused APIs
| APIs | Description |
|---|---|
| Career Coach | Provide tailored career recommendations based on skills, interests, and local labor-market demand. |
| Career Pathways | Help learners understand What can I do next? by mapping their current skills to future opportunities. |
| Salary Boosting Skills | Identify skills that offer the strongest wage growth potential so learners can upskill strategically. |
Together, these tools empower learners to explore, plan, and progress-improving outcomes at both the individual and institutional levels.
Use Cases
Below are common scenarios demonstrating how institutions use Lightcast APIs to support curriculum development, program planning, accreditation, learner guidance, and market intelligence.
Curriculum Planning
Our APIs help your institution make data-driven program decisions. Use labor-market demand and graduate-supply insights to identify which programs to build, update, promote, or scale. You can compare regional demand for occupations and skills with the programs you offer to uncover gaps.
By tagging your programs with relevant skills, you can see where current curricula do not align with market needs and identify opportunities to adjust or repurpose existing offerings to close those gaps.
Skill Classification for Learning Outcomes
Upload curriculum or course materials, extract the raw skills they contain, and classify them against the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy to understand the skills your learning outcomes represent.
APIs Used
- Authentication
- Classification - To classify the raw skills into Lightcast Skills Taxonomy.
Python Example
Map CIPs to LOT/SOC Occupations
Select a Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) code and map it to Lightcast Occupational Taxonomy (LOT) or Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) versions.
APIs Used
Python Example
Project Occupation Growth
Map CIP codes to LOT and evaluate long-term occupation growth trends.
APIs Used
Python Example
Review Enrollements & Completions of your's and other Benchmark schools
Retrieve metrics such as completions for programs (e.g., Computer Science graduates for 2025).
APIs Used
Python Example
Identify Growth Skills
Map CIPs to relevant skills and use job postings and projection APIs to determine which skills are most in demand.
APIs Used
Python Example
Find ROI (Return on Investment)-Boosting Skills for Graduates
Use LOT mapping to identify skills associated with the highest salary uplift.
APIs Used
Python Example
Occupations with better wages and ROI for Graduates
Map CIPs to LOT and retrieve wage information by occupation.
APIs Used
Python Example
Career Coach
Career Coach is one of the most widely adopted Lightcast products. It supports career discovery, exploration, and academic planning on a single platform.
Key capabilities
- Interest assessments for new or undecided learners
- Skills assessment for learners exploring new fields
- Career pathways based on interests, skills, or keyword search
- Recommended academic programs aligned to target careers
- Local job postings and employer-vetted opportunities
- Career Coach can be deployed as a standalone widget or integrated seamlessly using APIs.
Reproduce Widget
Use Career Coach APIs directly to build a fully customized version of the widget within your platform.
APIs Used
Python Example
Updated about 1 month ago