BridgeWorks
Every quarter, our employer relations team compiles a working snapshot of where the regional labor market is heating up, where it is cooling, and what we are seeing in actual placements. It is not a formal economic forecast. It is a working document that helps us calibrate our programs and that we share publicly because participants and partners often find it useful.
Here is the picture as Q1 closes.
The Headline: A Bifurcating Market
The single clearest pattern in the first quarter is bifurcation. Skilled trades, allied health, and infrastructure-adjacent fields are running hot. Entry-level office work, generalist administrative roles, and many junior knowledge-work positions are softer than they were a year ago.
Across the 154 employer partners in our network, posted openings increased 8.2 percent year over year in healthcare and 11.6 percent in skilled construction trades. Over the same period, postings for entry-level administrative and customer-service roles fell 14.3 percent. The story is consistent with national data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For job seekers, that bifurcation matters more than the aggregate unemployment number. The right strategy in 2026 looks very different depending on which side of that line you are on.
Where Hiring Is Strongest
Allied health. Demand for medical assistants, certified nursing assistants, dental hygienists, surgical techs, and pharmacy technicians has been consistently strong for two years and is accelerating. Our healthcare track placed 31 graduates in Q1, up from 22 in Q1 of last year. Average starting wages have risen about 6 percent year over year.
Skilled trades. Electrical, HVAC, plumbing, and welding remain in tight supply across our service area. Local and federal infrastructure spending continues to drive utility and transportation work. Apprenticeship slots that historically saw fifty applicants per opening now see fifteen, and qualified candidates are negotiating starting wages that would have been unusual two years ago.
Logistics and supply chain. Warehouse leadership, forklift operation, and last-mile dispatch coordination have all stayed strong. Wage growth is more modest here than in trades or healthcare, but openings are abundant and entry barriers are relatively low.
Cybersecurity support and IT helpdesk. Demand has shifted somewhat away from generalist software development and toward security operations and infrastructure support. Entry-level cyber and helpdesk roles with industry certifications are placing reliably in our market.
Where Things Are Tighter
Entry-level office and administrative roles. This is the softest segment in our regional data. AI-assisted automation is absorbing a large share of what used to be junior administrative work. Workers seeking these roles are facing more competition and longer searches.
Generalist customer service and call center work. Postings are down meaningfully year over year. Roles that remain are often hybrid or fully remote, which has expanded the candidate pool and pushed wages flat.
Junior marketing and communications. Several large regional employers have consolidated marketing teams over the past year. Fewer entry-level openings, more demand for measurable specialist skills like SEO, paid media, or copywriting tied to specific industries.
What This Means for Job Seekers
For people in our programs and others reading this, a few practical implications.
If you are flexible on field, the trade and healthcare tracks have the strongest hiring pipeline and the clearest starting wages. Both require certification programs that take months, not weeks, but the back-end employment outcomes are dramatically better than for most office paths right now.
If you are pursuing office work, specialize. Generalist administrative resumes are competing with hundreds of applicants per opening. Specific tools, specific industry experience, and concrete metrics on past work are what separates candidates in this segment.
If you have IT or technical interests, lean toward security and infrastructure rather than general software roles. The market for junior software developers has tightened, partly because of AI-assisted coding tools and partly because of broader tech sector consolidation. Security, networking, and cloud operations are holding up better.
Watch for return-to-office effects. A meaningful share of the regional employers in our network have moved back to four or five in-office days over the past six months. That has expanded the geographic footprint of who can apply for previously remote roles, which is putting downward pressure on wages for fully remote work.
Where We Are Investing Programmatically
Based on this picture, we made a few program adjustments going into Q2. We expanded our medical assistant cohort capacity from 18 to 24 seats per session. We added a new HVAC entry-level track in partnership with two regional contractors. We paused new enrollment in our generalist administrative track and redirected those advising hours into our healthcare and trades intake pipeline. We added a CompTIA Security+ certification path to our IT track.
We will publish the full Q1 placement and outcomes data in our annual report this summer. In the meantime, if you are reading this and thinking about your own next move, our career advising team is available by appointment. The labor market is more navigable than it looks from the outside, but the right path through it depends on the field. Come talk it through.
