Documentation Kenii Pathways How-to guides

Track labor-market demand

Applies to 2.0.0 and later

Set your state, add BLS and O*NET API keys, refresh labor-market data, and turn on and read Compass demand tracking.

Track labor-market demand

Pathways surfaces two different things under “demand”: labor-market data (wages, employment, and job growth for the occupations your programs lead to) and demand signals (what prospective students search for in Compass, on your own site). This guide covers turning both on, keeping the labor-market data fresh, and reading the results. For what each one means and its limits, see What demand signals are and are not.

Set your state for labor-market data

  1. In the Pathways sidebar, click Pathways Settings.
  2. Click the Career Data section.
  3. Under State, choose your state.
  4. Click Save Settings.

Wage, employment, and projection lookups localize to this state first, and fall back to national figures when a state-level number isn’t published for an occupation.

Add a BLS API key (optional)

  1. On the Career Data section, under BLS API Key (optional), paste a key.
  2. Click Save Settings.

Salary and employment data works without a key, at a lower rate limit. Get a free key at bls.gov/developers if you’re refreshing data for a lot of programs.

Add an O*NET API key

  1. On the Career Data section, under *ONET API Key (optional)**, paste a key.
  2. Click Save Settings.

The Top Skills panel on career outcome pages needs this key. Without one, no skills load for any occupation. Get a free key at services.onetcenter.org.

Projected outlook and job openings come from Projections Central and need no key.

Refresh the labor-market data

  1. On the Career Data section, use the three data actions:
    • Refresh Salary & Employment pulls current wage and employment figures from BLS for every occupation attached to a program.
    • Sync Projections pulls growth percentage and annual openings from Projections Central.
    • *Sync Skills (ONET)* pulls hard and soft skills from ONET (requires the O*NET key).

Run these after changing your state, and periodically afterward, salary and employment data is cached for about a week, projections and skills for about 30 days.

If you only need to refresh one occupation, open the program it’s on in Pathway Programs, go to its Career Data tab, and click the refresh icon on that occupation’s card.

Turn on demand tracking

  1. In Pathways Settings, click the Compass section.
  2. Turn on Enable Demand Tracking.
  3. Click Save Settings.

Demand tracking is off by default. While it’s off, Compass searches aren’t recorded anywhere. Once you turn it on, each Compass search records the interest, goal, and pace chosen, an anonymous session identifier (a one-way hash, not an IP address or any other personal data), and a timestamp. No name, email, or account is ever attached.

Read the demand dashboard

  1. In the Pathways sidebar, click Demand.
  2. Choose a date range: Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 90 days, or Last year.

The page shows total explorations for that range, a bar chart of the most-searched interests, and a table of interests with exploration and unique-user counts.

If demand tracking is off, this screen shows a notice instead of data and links back to Settings to turn it on.

Export demand data

  1. On the Demand screen, with a date range selected, click Export CSV.