DeUnemployment  ·  Data library

How much experience do employers actually ask for?

Most postings never say. When they do, the picture is blunt: explicitly entry-level roles are rare, and close to one posting in five asks for a degree or a licence. We measure the language of the posting — not what the employer privately means.

Key figures

Measure
Marked explicitly entry-level2.8%entry / graduate / trainee language
Entry-level, of postings that state experience22%the rest ask for more
State years of experience12.9%the rest stay silent
Require a degree or licence18.3%credential language detected
Junior / mid / senior in the title10.1 / 78.1 / 11.9%seniority read from the title

Frequently asked

Why is entry-level so rare?

We can only count what a posting says, and many roles open to beginners never label themselves that way. So 2.8% is a floor, not the whole market — and even among postings that do state experience, entry-level demands are 22%.

How do you detect a credential requirement?

By language: degree, diploma, licence, certification. It is a detector, not a judgement — a posting can imply a requirement without stating it, and our count will miss that.

Is the market closed to juniors?

That is not what this measures. It measures what postings ask for. The seniority mix read from titles is flat: 10.1% junior, 78.1% mid, 11.9% senior.

Sources & citation. Measured over the September 2026 edition record set — full-corpus pass (measured 2026-09-15), not a sample — and 25,080 probed links. The index holds 7,415,865 postings, 3,624,739 of them live with a full description. License CC BY 4.0. Data: JSON · CSV · data health · methodology.
Press, research and custom cuts: [email protected] · Cite as: DeUnemployment, “Experience and credential demands in job postings — 2026-09-20”, https://deunemployment.com/data/experience-and-credentials (2026-09-20).

Need a different cut? Every figure on this page comes from one index, so we can extract almost any slice on request — a city, a role, an industry, a time window, or a comparison between platforms. Tell us what you need at [email protected] and we will pull it, publish it with its method, and hand you the numbers. All we ask in return is a citation.

More data

“Still listed” is a listing-age measure from the source publish date, not a verification that a role is open; link liveness is measured separately. The percentages are the September 2026 edition (full pass, measured 2026-09-15); the index counts are rebuilt by every nightly update, most recently 2026-09-20. Page generated 2026-09-21.