What is changing?
Lightcast will be upgrading its location coding process to Google geocoding.
When will this change take place?
This change will take place on the 29th Augusts for Talent Analyst Global, Data Share and Data Feed customers. The change will be reflected in Labour Insight on 1st September.
What will this change mean for me?
Total postings counts will show changes across postings history compared to prior posting volumes.
Estimated national annual changes are as follows for new postings:
Year | Australia | New Zealand |
2020 | 2%-3% | 2%-3% |
2021 | 2%-4% | 2%-5% |
2022 | 3%-5% | 3%-5% |
2023 | 4%-5% | 5%-6% |
2024 | 4%-5% | 5%-6% |
2025 | 4%-6% | 5%-6% |
Active postings will experience similar annual changes.
What are the benefits of this change?
Lightcast's improved location classification will enable:
More accurate locations for postings on the whole.
More granularity in location coding where we know that posting has a specific city location.
City locations will expand from 112 in Australia to approximately 1000
City locations will expand from 68 in New Zealand to approximately 200
What does this mean for my analysis?
Overall posting counts have shifted, but the trends remain constant. This is primarily a technical change in processing to create a better on-going experience with Lightcast job postings.
Consistent trends: Looking at the change from a ranking/distribution standpoint we see the same/similar rankings in occupations, skills, titles and all other data points as we did previously.
Change in overall volume for new postings: Customers will expect to see some variations in specific location counts.
More noticeable changes potential in specific analyses: In more targeted analyses, especially around locations, customers may see more significant shifts. We have seen a proportional change in all other data elements, but customers may choose to rerun some analysis due to this. This is most important in those cases where specific volume of postings matters more than trends and relative volume measures more frequently utilized.
Why am I seeing change in numbers?
Unique locations help us to deduplicate postings
As we are increasing the number of locations we are able to successfully match postings to, customers will see an increase in posting counts
What is your deduplication process?
The deduplication process can be found here
What is the difference between new and active postings?
More information on this can be found here
What other upgrades have you done to Australia and New Zealand data?
Lightcast has been upgrading the data set as part of our long term investment in Australia and New Zealand labour market data. Recently this has included:
Furthermore Lightcast make monthly improvements across all aspects of coding for all time data. More information can be found here