What We Learned From 18 Months of Tracking Indeed Manufacturing Data

Back in January of 2022, Center of Excellence staff started tracking Indeed job postings for manufacturing and aerospace. With the query parameters set to Washington State, we would check at least weekly to look at the number of job postings for manufacturing and aerospace, and posted our initial findings in 2022.

We started keeping track of these numbers—6301 job postings for manufacturing and 1089 for aerospace on January 28th, 2022—without a set goal or project in mind. While beginning without the end in mind is usually not advised, we found that a regular snapshot of the numbers told us some things about the state of our industries week-to-week. What did we learn?

• We’ve seen a general decline in postings, especially in manufacturing, during the period we tracked.

• The numbers varied greatly. For manufacturing, during our tracking period we saw a high of 8,025 job postings on May 13, 2022 to a low of 4,502 on May 30, 2023. For aerospace, we saw a high of 1,527 on March 22, 2022 and a low of 824 on July 27, 2023.

• The average number of postings over our tracking period was 6,073 for manufacturing and 1,156 for aerospace.

• Manufacturing and aerospace job postings are correlated. When one rises or falls, the other generally does as well. Our correlation coefficient for the reporting period was 0.97958.

• Today’s numbers are 4,636 for manufacturing and 878 for aerospace. 

For as much as we were able to glean from these numbers, there are still unknowables. Are employers using Indeed as much now as 18 months ago? More? Have the ways Indeed tracks job postings changed over this period? They’re a tech company, so we’d guess yes. 

Throughout our recording period, we recognized there were probably automated ways to get this data. Instead, we decided to look the data up ourselves, to reflect on the numbers for a few minutes each week, and to take these data points as telling us something, but not everything.