Audio Transcript:

Brady Brewer: Hi, and welcome to the Purdue Commercial AgCast, the Purdue University Center for Commercial Agriculture’s podcast featuring farm management news and information. I’m your host, Brady Brewer, and joining me today is Josh Strine, who’s a graduate student here at Purdue University in the Department of Agricultural Economics.

On today’s episode, we will be discussing an update to the latest ag job numbers based on a data set that Josh curates here at Purdue. Before we get into that topic, I want to remind everyone that you can find more farm management news and information at the Center for Commercial Agriculture’s website at purdue.edu/commercialag.

So Josh, this is your first time on the Purdue Commercial AgCast. First off, welcome. And second off, if you want to give an introduction, tell the listeners a little bit about who you are.

Josh Strine: Perfect. Well, thank you for having me on. I just wrapped up my first year in the PhD program here at Purdue. Prior to being here, I spent two years down at Texas A& M getting my Master’s in Agricultural Economics, and before that, I spent four years at Ohio State with a Bachelor’s in Animal Science and Agricultural Economics. I’m looking forward to taking some time to share some of this cool research that we’re working on today.

Brady Brewer: Sounds good. Well, let’s get into what the ag jobs dashboard is. So I want to remind all the listeners we did an episode on the Ag Jobs Dashboard a little over a year ago. If you want to go take a listen to that, you can, but we’re going to be providing you an update and a little bit of what it is regardless. So, Josh, what is the Ag Jobs Dashboard?

Josh Strine: The Ag Jobs Dashboard is a tool on the Center for Commercial Ag website using data that we are pulling from Google Jobs. So what we are doing is we are collecting agricultural jobs from all across the United States about once a month. And with that, we are then able to find some of the information, different details about those jobs that are available. Uh, might include salary, or what kind of job they are within agriculture, uh, agronomy, animal science, that kind of thing. And then anyone who is interested can go to the website and pick and choose what they want to see. Um, maybe they’re looking for jobs in sales, engineering, really any sub sector of the agricultural job market and just find out different details about what the current market looks like, where the jobs are located. But then we can also look and see how those trends have changed. Right now over the last six months, but as we continue to collect that available data, we’ll continue to expand on this website.

Brady Brewer: If you want to go interact with this data, the dashboard allows you to see what, for instance, what are the animal science jobs in Indiana currently based on the latest scrape, which is typically within the past month. But if you Google just Purdue Ag Jobs Dashboard, it will get to you to the right location.

Now Josh, you mentioned the scrape, right? So this is scraping from if, if a company posts a job on say an AgJobs dashboard or even a general jobs dashboard, it is pulled into our data.

Josh Strine: That is correct. So we are scraping Google Jobs and Google Jobs pulls different job boards all over the internet. It’s possible they’re coming from company specific job postings or other general job boards like Zip Recruiter. It does not include Indeed, but several of those other job boards are all compiled right into Google Jobs. And so then once we scrape to Google Jobs, we’ll be getting any posting, that may be on multiple job boards, and we can compile that in to find how many unique jobs, through some further work with the data, we can see how many new jobs there are, and just give a good overview of the current job market, or job board.

On that website as well, I want to mention the reports that are at the bottom. That data is actually a little different. So if you do take any time to read the reports versus what we have on the dashboard, you’ll notice that we have quite a few more jobs, uh, on the job dashboard. So that’s something that we’re working on getting to be at the same level, but just a little nuanced difference between the reports and the dashboard.

Brady Brewer: Yeah, so when you pull these jobs, you get all the text information, what the company is looking for in terms of requirements, maybe potential salary, if they’re posting salary information, um, also the location of the job, and then you’re taking that and then you’re analyzing all these postings to pull out the trends among all the the postings at different companies or in some cases the same company are demanding right now from the their job seekers.

Josh Strine: Yeah.

Brady Brewer: So let’s get into this data and discuss some of the latest trends. I’m going to divide this into short term trends and long term trends, thinking about stuff that maybe we’ve picked up here that in summer of 2024 versus, uh, trends that have been going on for a while in the data.

So, first one, new jobs that you scraped here in June of 2024, relative to 2024, what is happening with just the most recent number of jobs that you have scraped out there on the internet?

Josh Strine: So in this most recent scrape, we actually had a huge uptick in the number of total job openings largely driven by a large number of new jobs. Just two months ago now, in May, there were just over 2,000 new jobs in the agriculture area that had been posted and we collected from Google Jobs. Last month in June, we had over 3,000. So that’s almost a 50 percent increase in the number of new jobs in agriculture that are available across the country. Very big upswing, not necessarily just the number, but the amount of increase over the prior month. We haven’t really seen before, so it’ll be interesting to see what that means going forward.

Brady Brewer: Now, has this happened before? Do we suspect this may be seasonal? I mean, I can think of, like, summer jobs, right? Like, if you think about a lot of the crops. fruit and vegetables. They need some seasonal labor to come in and pick and harvest. Is that driving this? Or do you think this is above and beyond what we’ve seen seasonally in prior years?

Josh Strine: It does look to be a similar trend to last summer. We did have a one month increase a little bit earlier. It was around May. And then it slowly decreased back down to the 2000- 2500 new job range. Which has kind of been a stable level here for the last two years, but it is higher than that so far and a little later. So we’ll see if it follows what we saw last summer.

Brady Brewer: Yeah. So maybe a little bit more of an uptick.

And I do want to clarify for people. So when you hear Josh saying, you know, back down to like, So when he’s saying, you know, 2000 2500 jobs, really what that signifies is that any given time on the Google jobs board, there’s about 2000 to 2500 jobs as a baseline that are in what we would call the agricultural supply chain. So we’re scraping, you know, broadly speaking, agriculture, food farming jobs. So when he’s saying, you know, 2000 2500, that’s The amount of job openings that are available nationwide at any given time in agriculture.

So another short term trend that I want to ask you about, Josh, is jobs that mention entry level work. I mentioned earlier that, you, analyze the text within each of these jobs postings and one thing we can pull out is are companies that are demanding these jobs, are they looking for entry level work or someone who has entry level experience? And what’s so what’s happening with jobs that mention maybe entry level experience or work?

Josh Strine: So going a little further into what we’re looking for in entry level jobs Those will be jobs that in the description they’ll say entry level, trainee, no experience, and we again, similar to the number of new jobs, saw a massive uptick in the number of entry level jobs as a percentage of the new jobs available. So prior to June, we were sitting between 2 and 3 percent for about five months straight of the percentage of new jobs that were entry level. We saw there in June, that number jumped up to 5.6 percent of our new jobs were entry level jobs. So that is a massive increase over the relatively stable level before that. Uh, we don’t see that kind of increase in the last two years. Actually, the last time we saw that number was way back in October or November of 2021. So it’s been a while since that percentage of new jobs are entry level.

Brady Brewer: Yeah. So we can speculate a lot on this. I mean, I think first, Josh, this may, this is a good sign for anyone who maybe doesn’t have a whole lot of experience, right? There’s a larger amount of companies out there willing or looking to hire people that maybe not have experience in the field they’re looking for, or the role they’re looking for. Um, this could also signal higher turnover rates, maybe more retirements, and there’s a lot of things that could be driving this, and we don’t know exactly for sure, right? We can sit here and speculate, uh, a lot on, on that. But, you know, I would say for sure this means if you’re a first time job looker, this is a good sign that there’s more companies willing to accept you without experience for that role.

So let’s move on to some long-term trends now. So we already mentioned that we can track salaries or what the expected salary range is for certain roles. One thing that you track, Josh, is the number of jobs that just post salaries, right? People don’t have to post a salary when they post a job. They can keep it hidden and then pay accordingly to the skills they think the potential applicant has. But you actually track the number of job postings that actually post a salary or salary range on it. So what’s been happening there?

Josh Strine: So again, most recently in June, we saw over a third of the job openings on Google jobs that we collected, had their salary posted either independently in the salary section or somewhere within the description of the job. And that is a continued increase from what we’ve seen over the past two years. Just back in June of 2022, it was floating around 13 percent of our jobs included salary information somewhere in the posting. So that trend has been continually increasing since that time. And that kind of follows suit with the general job market, work done by Indeed and other job boards that collect these have also posted that they see a continued increase in the percent of jobs that are listing their salary information.

Brady Brewer: So ag is in the same general trend as the overall economy here, right? So if you’re job seeker looking outside of agriculture, more jobs that are listing posting same thing that we see, which is what we see here for agriculture as well. So Josh, I’ll put you on the spot. What do we think is motivation here? Why do we think companies are all of a sudden, I mean, this is almost double, right? Twice as many companies are posting a salary or salary range relative to in the past. What do we think is driving these higher amount of job postings that are listing a potential salary for potential applicants?

Josh Strine: I would say this is coming from the consumers or the people that are looking for jobs and the information that they are wanting or requiring before applying for accepting jobs. There is a lot of other work and news out there that they have said that applicants are applying less to jobs or jobs are sitting on the market longer if they aren’t posting that salary information. So that kind of information is something that people looking for jobs want to have. And in order to recruit and get the applicants that you want for your job, it’s becoming more and more common that you need to include that salary information

Brady Brewer: Yeah, so it’s a marketing or a signaling tool to for potential applicants, say hey, we’re willing to pay this and it sounds like applicants now, if you don’t do that, they are less likely to apply. So I think there’s a important outcome here for, if you’re a company, an agribusiness company that’s looking to hire and you may be having a hard time, not posting your salary or, or at least salary range with the job posting may, may potentially shrink your applicant pool as it is a marketing or a signaling initiative to the people that are scouring the, the job boards looking for, for a job.

Jobs I’ve applied for have never posted salary range. It’s never deterred me. But I also realized that if you think about new generations of our college graduates are used to having kind of full information with social media and stuff like that. So maybe that’s what, there’s a whole host of reasons that could be driving, uh, why this is now more effective in terms of posting the salaries now relative to in the recent past. But it is interesting nonetheless to see it happen in real time because, as you said, it’s double the amount that are posting it.

Josh Strine: Yeah.

Brady Brewer: So let’s move on to our next trend. One thing that you track, Josh, is educational requirements. So what’s going on with the, what companies are at least putting in their job posting in terms of the educational requirements that they want out of their applicants.

Josh Strine: This follows a similar trend actually to our salary posting in that for the last two years there’s been a increase in the level of education and the amount of jobs that are posting, um, education, either requirements or, um, preferences.

Again, we’re pulling this data from the description, so we don’t really know if they’re asking for a requirement. We’re just seeing if these jobs mention at all different degree levels.

Brady Brewer: Yeah, so they could put master’s degree and end up hiring someone that does not have a master’s degree if they think they have the required skills. So we don’t know if these are stringent requirements for the job, right? Like, oh, you don’t have this requirement, so therefore we’re not going to consider you as an applicant. But they’re at least signaling this is the preferred qualification they want.

Josh Strine: Yeah, that’s correct. And it’s possible that they will list several if they may require masters and would prefer a PhD or any levels there. There may be more than one education level listed, but, um, regardless, we are seeing the number of jobs that are listing educational levels in their description consistently increased over the last two years. Specifically master’s degrees are one that we do see that has continued to increase. It is now the second most common degree level that we see in these job descriptions following bachelor’s degrees.

Brady Brewer: Yeah. So sounds like there’s been a large increase in the amount of master’s degree that are mentioned in these job requirements. Do we have any indication, or any conjecture why we’re seeing this increase in degree requirements, especially at the master’s degree for these jobs.

Josh Strine: I don’t know if I can think of any thing that is leading exactly to it, but I do think it ties in well with maybe what jobs are looking for. Another thing that we are seeing that may correlate with this master’s degree is the skill requirements and different aspects of candidates that these jobs are looking for in their descriptions. We have also seen at the same time as these master’s degrees requirements or preferences are increasing a increasing desire to have candidates with technical skills. So using the same methodology, we’re looking for requirements or preferences of candidates that these jobs have. So things such as quantitative skills or data skills, Microsoft, those hard technical skills that you may learn in a higher degree or higher level education, have also increased at the same time as the master’s degrees.

Brady Brewer: Yeah, so it sounds like companies are signaling they want these quantitative, coding, I don’t want to say it’s only computer skills, but typically these go hand in hand with computer skills, from their candidates and that is highly correlated with this increase in postings that at least mention a master’s degree.

I think that makes sense. And you know, we’re both at a University. You’re still getting your PhD. I, I’m thankfully on the other side but I we have seen those type of skills when we meet with employers and, and frankly, when we talk with our students, you know, more students are anecdotally, I, I know of several students that have gone and taken computer programming classes as electives, because they know that that is a coveted skill out in the workforce and it’ll make a more marketable. The students are responding to this as well.

So Josh, I would agree. I think that the increase in degrees that we see, and especially the increase in master’s degree, that companies are at least signaling they want goes hand in hand with what skills they’re wanting their potential applicants to have, or at least come in ready with already having, so they don’t have to train them in, in some of these areas when they hire them.

Josh Strine: Yeah.

Brady Brewer: Well, that concludes our discussion of the ag jobs dashboard. I want to remind everyone, if you want to know more about the ag job market, please google Purdue Ag Jobs Dashboard. You can go on that dashboard, select your state, your location that you are in. You can even filter by job type, skill type or education type, jobs that you are interested in and, and want to analyze so you can play around with that data. If you’re someone looking for more farm management news and information, I encourage you to visit the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture’s website at purdue.edu/commercialag. On behalf of the Center for Commercial Agriculture, I want to thank you for listening.