Job Vacancies that Require Education Beyond High School, Less than a Bachelor’s
April 07, 2025In 2024, Oregon private employers reported 57,800 job openings at any given time. This was 21% below 2023 with a reported 72,800 job openings. Looking at the characteristics of all private job openings in 2024, 79% were for a full-time position, 94% were permanent positions, 55% required previous experience, and 55% were reported by employers as difficult to fill. The average hourly starting wage offered was $25.37.
What about job openings that require education beyond high school, but less than a bachelor's degree – those that require some sort of postsecondary education, associate degree, or other certification? These types of job vacancies tend to be high-paying, have larger shares that are difficult for employers to fill, and have been growing as a share of total hiring demand over the past 10 years.
Oregon Job Vacancies by Education Level
Of the 57,800 job openings in 2024, about a quarter (15,321) required something beyond high school but less than a bachelor’s degree, henceforth referred to as “postsecondary education.” The job vacancies requiring postsecondary education had roughly the same share for full-time and permanent positions as job openings across all education levels. The postsecondary education vacancies were more likely to require previous experience (63%), and a larger share were difficult to fill (68%). The average hourly wage was also higher, at $33.61.
Trends Over Time
Over the past decade, the number of vacancies requiring postsecondary education has fluctuated with economic conditions. The number of these vacancies increased steadily from 8,300 in 2015 to 13,600 in 2019, before dropping in 2020 due to the pandemic recession. Vacancies requiring postsecondary education skyrocketed – along with all categories of job openings – to nearly 21,000 in 2021, and have slowly decreased since then.
Despite these year-to-year changes in the number of vacancies, job openings with postsecondary education requirements have generally become a larger share of all job vacancies over time. They accounted for 17% of all job openings in 2015. By 2024, more than one-fourth (27%) of all job vacancies in Oregon required some credential beyond high school, or an associate degree, but less than a bachelor’s.
Difficult-to-Fill Job Vacancies Requiring Postsecondary Education
From 2015 to 2024, job vacancies that require postsecondary education have ranged between 65% and 85% difficult to fill. From 2015 to 2020, the share of postsecondary education job vacancies that were considered difficult to fill ranged in the mid to upper 70s. This share rose to 80% and 85% in 2021 and 2022, respectively. In 2023, the share dropped to 77% and further declined to 68% in 2024.
Though the trend in number of vacancies is similar, the share of difficult to fill vacancies is much lower for all vacancies than postsecondary education vacancies. Between 2015 and 2024, the share of postsecondary job vacancies that were difficult to fill was at least 8 percentage points higher than the share for all vacancies, and reached 20 percentage points higher in 2019. On average over the past decade, postsecondary education job vacancies have been more difficult to fill by 14 percentage points than those difficult to fill vacancies at all education levels.
When we dive into the specifics of why employers state these jobs are difficult to fill, there are several categories they could fall into: lack of applicants, lack of certification, lack of qualified candidates, location, lack of technical skills, low wages, etc. By far, the majority of job vacancies in 2024 that required postsecondary education were difficult to fill because of a lack of qualified candidates. There was also a decent share of vacancies that were difficult to fill due to a lack of applicants. Both reasons point to not enough people in the labor market, especially people with the necessary requirements for these job vacancies. In fact, these top two reasons that postsecondary vacancies were difficult to fill matched the reasons in 2022 and 2023 as well.
When it comes to occupations with the highest number of vacancies reported as difficult to fill that require postsecondary education, truck drivers top the list. Of the 1,141 truck driver job vacancies at any given time in 2024, 931 of them were difficult to fill, or 82%. Not to mention, of the top occupations with the highest number of vacancies reported as difficult to fill among all education levels, occupations that required postsecondary education accounted for 10 of the top 15.
Of these top vacancies, massage therapists and automotive service technicians and mechanics were the most difficult-to-fill occupations based on the share of all vacancies, at 98% and 92%, respectively.
Futhermore, these occupations requiring postsecondary education are among the occupations that have the largest number of total vacancies – 60% of the top 15 occupations with the highest number of job vacancies require postsecondary education. This amounts to over 9,000 job vacancies among the most frequent occupations that require postsecondary education. Additionally, some of these occupations consistently show up year after year – truck drivers, nursing assistants, and registered nurses, specifically. They are persistently in demand and tend to have larger shares that are difficult to fill.
More information about Oregon’s job vacancies, including quarterly and annual indicators for Oregon and sub-state areas, can be found at QualityInfo.org under the Job Vacancy Survey section of the Publications page.