Welcome to the Career Economy!
May 2025 Edition
aka: Where we try to make sense of the job market so you don’t have to scream into the void.
We’re still on the roller coaster. No exit in sight.
April brought us another set of job numbers, a fresh round of revisions, and more questions than answers. And let me tell you—there’s no shortage of mixed signals, or as my friend and fellow career economy geek, Erin Riska, says, counterfactuals all around!
So, in an effort to continue our new-ish format with a little less overwhelming (confusing) data and more highlights to help you tune into the parts of the storm worth watching…here we go!
The Pulse: Here’s What Happened in March
- Jobs Added: 177,000
- Unemployment Rate: Holding steady at 4.2% 🤷
- Wage Growth: +0.2% this month (+3.8% year-over-year)
- Federal Employment: Down again (-9,000 monthly and -26,000 total since January)
Bright Spots:
- Healthcare: +51,000 (steady as ever)
- Transportation & Warehousing: +29,000 (Warehouses, couriers, and air transit lead the way. Potentially of note here, our little mountain town is back to two-day Amazon deliveries after a few years of four-day Prime…and some things we can get in one day! Something is afoot in transportation and logistics!)
- Financial Activities: +14,000 (creeping up, not exploding)
- Social Assistance: +8,000 (slowing, but still growing)
- Professional and Business Services (includes Tech): +17,000 (modest yet steady and heavily domain-dependent)
Revision Watch:
Turns out March wasn’t as strong as we thought—it got revised down by 43,000 jobs, and February lost another 15,000, so that’s kind of fun.🙄 This is why we really need to look at a rolling three-month period to understand what’s happening in the market; even with the 43K cut to March’s new jobs, we’re still over 200K – that’s not something to discount.
Trends We’re Tracking (a.k.a. Parts of the Sh*t Storm Worth Watching)
1. Skills-Based Hiring Is Getting Real
For the last few years, companies said they were hiring based on skills, but still asked for 47 years of experience in something that’s only existed since 2020.
Now? We’re seeing the shifts.
Certifications, portfolios, and project outcomes are starting to matter more than fancy job titles, especially in tech, operations, and even customer success roles.
What this means: If you’re pivoting or coming back from a break, your ability to show what you can do is finally starting to carry some weight again.
2. The Rise of Personal Branding (and Why It Matters)
With more candidates competing for fewer openings, and skills-based hiring on the rise, your personal brand—your unique value, how you show up and talk about that, and who you surround yourself with—is no longer optional.
Recruiters and hiring managers are paying attention to your LinkedIn presence, thought leadership, and even digital portfolios to assess your expertise and fit.
What this means: Whether you’re job searching or not, invest in your digital footprint. A personal/professional brand and reputation are a smart (and now necessary) strategy. People are saying things about you when you’re not in the room; it’s a good insurance policy to have control over that perception. 😉
3. The Market Isn’t Shrinking—It’s Shifting
My aforementioned friend Erin shared a LinkedIn post that made me want to run up to a rooftop and shout “YES!” because it made a great point: while job openings are down from this time last year, they’re still higher than they were in February 2020. And while long-term unemployment ticked up to 1.7 million, the rate (about 0.98%) is right in line with historical averages.
So, is this market tough? Yes. But is it broken? Not exactly.
What this means: We’re not in a free fall—we’re just on a new track. That’s why it feels weird. You’re not imagining it; things are changing. Different doesn’t mean bad; it’s just, well, different.
What You Can Actually Do
Because doom-scrolling is NOT a strategy!
In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed something interesting: hiring teams seem to have collectively shrugged and decided to press on, even in the face of uncertainty. Earlier this year, we saw micro-reactions to political and economic shifts (hi, tariffs 👋)—jobs would disappear overnight when tensions flared and reappear as soon as the headlines cooled. But now? It feels like teams are done waiting for the stability that might never come.
Job postings are holding, interviews are picking up pace, and there’s been a clear uptick in technical leadership and engineering roles, particularly in (larger) small and mid-sized tech companies.
It’s still competitive, and the pace of interview processes is still slower than we’d like, but we’ve transitioned from reactive pause to resilient progress.
We’ll take the small win and carry on. Speaking of, here are a few ways you can do just that, depending on where you sit in your career (and life) path.
🔎 If You’re Job Searching (or Considering It)
✔ Show the receipts. Build a portfolio, highlight project outcomes, and tie your experience to the results you’ve created. Skills-first hiring means you get to drive the narrative.
✔ Be quick & tailored. Apply within 24-48 hours of a posting and make your resume match the language of the job description. No fluff.
✔ Lean into overlooked industries. Healthcare-adjacent, logistics, fintech, and SaaS are hiring—even if they don’t scream “dream job,” they can be a bridge.
💪 If You’re Staying Put (But Want to Stay Smart)
✔ Stay visible. Lead a project, ask to present results, or mentor someone. This is not the time to be heads-down and hoping for recognition; do not leave your professional development up to chance!
✔ Upskill with intention. AI fluency, cross-functional collaboration, and systems thinking are hot assets inside orgs right now, and leaning into them will help you stay relevant.
✔ Document everything. Your future resume, performance review, and promotion case will thank you.
💼 If You’re Running a Business or Leading a Team
✔ Match your message to the moment. Buyers are still hesitant—don’t oversell. Clarify your value, show up with stability, and stand behind promises you can produce. No coach (or client) benefits from a “tell them what they want to hear” approach!
✔ Watch hiring trends in your target industries. If they’re shrinking, your sales might, too. Get ahead of it with strong differentiators in your marketing, value-added services, and expanded offerings to increase the lifetime value of the clients who do come through the door.
✔ Double down on trust-building. In chaotic times, being a safe bet wins. Be consistent, deliver great service, and make it easy for people to say “yes.”
The Bottom Line
The labor market is weird. It’s not free-falling, but it’s not soaring either. We’re watching a slow, strange shift toward a more skills-focused, slightly more level-headed economy—but the ride will stay bumpy, so keep your seatbelt fastened and enjoy the views out the window.
👉 Keep your eye on what you can do (i.e. control what you can control).
👉 Don’t internalize every scary headline (i.e. no more doom scrolling).
👉 And if you’re frustrated, you’re in good company (i.e. you’re not alone!).
We’ve got this.
Be curious. Be kind. Be you.
Your Friend and Coach,
Angie Callen, CERW, CPRW, CPCC
