The digital economy is no longer just a tech-sector story in New York City. A new analysis from the Center for an Urban Future finds that 44.2 percent of all job postings in the city in 2025 asked for in-demand digital skills, up from 34.5 percent in 2015 — and the surge is concentrated in industries that have long offered the most accessible entry points into the workforce, including retail, construction, hospitals and home health care.
The numbers grew even faster than the share. Postings seeking digital skills rose from 251,475 to 352,806 over the decade, a 40.3 percent increase that outpaced overall job postings more than four to one. By 2025, employers asked for digital skills in nearly half of postings in transportation and warehousing (48.6 percent), educational services (48.3 percent) and construction (43.5 percent), plus about four in ten retail postings (39.8 percent) and nearly a third of hospital jobs (31.5 percent). Manufacturing crossed the majority threshold at 51.4 percent, as did finance and insurance at 60.3 percent.
The mix of skills is also shifting with the AI era. Of the top 1,000 unique digital skills listed in city job postings in 2025, 15 percent did not appear at all three years earlier — a list that includes generative AI, prompt engineering and ChatGPT alongside established tools like Power BI, Snowflake and Databricks. Employers increasingly want workers comfortable with customer management systems, scheduling and records platforms, data pipelines and productivity software that are becoming part of daily operations in non-office jobs.
The report’s practical worry is a growing mismatch on the supply side. Workforce training providers told the center that many participants arrive without basic digital literacy even as employers raise expectations for software, data and AI-related skills. A home health aide, where more than half of workers hold at most a high school degree, now encounters digital requirements in nearly a quarter of postings, up from 13.7 percent a decade ago. A construction or maintenance worker is expected to use digital project management, logistics and inventory tools that didn’t exist in the role ten years ago.
The findings arrive as city leaders weigh how to keep entry-level pathways open in an economy where AI is absorbing routine tasks. The center recommends treating digital skill-building as a core part of New York’s economic mobility agenda: strengthening the full continuum from basic literacy to advanced data and AI skills, scaling programs that work, and funding providers themselves to adapt their curricula. For the city’s employers, the message is that the applicant pool with the fluency they want is not building itself — and for the city’s job seekers, that the jobs easiest to walk into are no longer the ones easiest to get.
