44% of NYC Job Postings Now Ask for Digital Skills, Even in Construction and Retail. What Small Employers Should Take From the Data

NEW YORK — You don’t have to run a tech company to be hiring for tech skills. A new report from the Center for an Urban Future (CUF), a New York think tank, finds that digital skill requirements are spreading through jobs that rarely used to list them, from construction and warehousing to retail and home health care.

The study, by Rachel Neches and Eli Dvorkin and supported by a grant from Verizon, analyzed job-postings data from the labor-market analytics firm Lightcast. Gothamist reported that researchers looked at hundreds of thousands of public postings from 2015 to 2025.

The Numbers

Citywide, the share of job postings asking for in-demand digital skills rose from 34.5% in 2015 to 44.2% in 2025, according to CUF. The number of postings seeking those skills grew 40.3%, from 251,475 to 352,806, more than four times as fast as postings overall. Meanwhile, postings that didn’t list such skills fell by nearly 31,600.

The increase reached well beyond tech. Among the 2025 figures CUF reported:

• Manufacturing: 51.4% of postings, up from 35.2% in 2015.
• Transportation and warehousing: 48.6%, up from 33.6%.
• Construction: 43.5%, up from 32.5%.
• Retail: 39.8%, up from 27.9%.
• Home health care services: 23.4%, up from 13.7%.

In construction, CUF found, postings asking for digital skills made up roughly 75% of net posting growth over the decade. In retail, it was about 60%.

What Employers Are Asking For

Gothamist reported that the top five in-demand digital skills were Microsoft Office, data analysis, the Python programming language, Microsoft Outlook and familiarity with AI software.

The mix is changing fast. Among the top 1,000 digital skills in NYC postings in 2025, CUF found that 14.8% didn’t appear just three years earlier. Generative AI, prompt engineering and ChatGPT weren’t in the city’s postings at all in 2022. By 2025, generative AI appeared in 9,682 postings and ChatGPT in 1,673.

Everyday workplace software is becoming a baseline expectation, too. Postings asking for productivity-software skills more than tripled from 2022 to 2025, from 1,551 to 5,125. CUF named tools such as Google Workspace, Teams, Slack and Zoom.

And soft skills haven’t gone away. The share of postings explicitly asking for communication rose from 40.7% in 2022 to 45.0% in 2025, according to the report.

The Pay Gap

CUF found that full-time postings asking for at least one digital skill advertised a median salary of $110,000, about 25% higher than the $87,900 median for postings without them. That’s an advertised figure across the whole market, not a promise for any single role, but it signals how employers value these skills.

Why It Matters for Small Businesses

For a small business, the report reads like a description of what’s already happening on the job. CUF gives examples: a health care worker navigating electronic records and scheduling systems, a construction or maintenance worker using project-management or inventory software, a retail worker using customer-management systems and basic data tools.

Training providers told CUF the gap is widening. “Employers are demanding digital skills at a higher rate,” said Mia Wilson, chief strategy officer of Grace Institute, a tuition-free workforce program for women. “But the digital literacy and skills gap has not decreased.”

A few practical takeaways for owners who hire:

Write the job you actually have. If a role requires a point-of-sale system, a scheduling app or a shared spreadsheet, say so in the posting, and name the tool. Vague “computer skills” requirements can scare off people who could learn your system in a day.

Decide what you’ll train, not just what you’ll require. With tools changing this quickly, a candidate who is comfortable learning new software may be worth more than one who knows last year’s app. Short, written how-tos for your own systems can make onboarding much faster.

Look at partners before you build training from scratch. CUF recommends partnerships between digital-skills trainers and industry-specific workforce programs. Nonprofits such as Grace Institute and NPower, both quoted in the report, already train New Yorkers, and the city’s Department of Small Business Services offers free services for businesses, including help with hiring.

Don’t forget your current team. The fastest way to fill a skills gap may be upskilling someone who already knows your business.

What the Report Asks of the City

CUF calls for a major new city investment in workforce training, a renewed Digital Equity Plan with libraries and community groups as partners, an AI Workforce Preparation Fund with a citywide AI workforce task force, and a “CS4All 2.0” to expand computing education in schools. Whether the city takes up any of those ideas is a question for the months ahead. For employers, the data already describes the hiring market they’re in.

Entrepreneurs Of New York is an independent publication and is not affiliated with the Center for an Urban Future.