Looking for work? A new interactive mapping tool helps job seekers pinpoint the cities, counties and states with the best opportunities for their particular skills.
Users plug in their occupation, and a free, color-coded U.S. map from Glassdoor, a job search website, highlights the areas with the most job openings for their line of work. A nurse who clicks on the map, for example, will find that Texas has more than 40,000 openings. Zoom in further and the map will show that Dallas alone has 3,330 vacant positions.
The map also can zero in on specific cities where a couple might find the best combined opportunities to land work, even when their chosen fields are different.
To get the scoop on a particular employer, the tool provides data such as size, annual revenue, salary estimates for certain positions and whether the company has won awards and accolades. It also shows how current employees rate the company for work-life balance, benefits, culture, career opportunities and management.
Another interesting feature of the tool is its ability to show other positions for which a person may qualify.
Robert Hohman, cofounder and CEO of Glassdoor, told Bloomberg News that his staff looked at millions of résumés to learn the next position that people in a particular occupation went on to do – and assigned a probability to that. For instance, 20 percent of warehouse workers went on to become delivery drivers, he said. Likewise, 15 percent of delivery drivers transitioned to work as security officers.
So if a person searches for a delivery driver job, the progression tool might suggest other positions, such as security guard.
“It’s like having a career mentor,” Hohman said.