September 2026 - Minnesota Economic Trends
This issue highlights Minnesota's new long term employment projections, provides student career exploration insights, looks at emerging AI skill trends in job postings, explores recredentialing internationally trained professionals, and covers evidence-based approaches for building effective career pathways.
Stable to Moderate Growth: Minnesota’s 2024-2034 Employment Projections
This report outlines Minnesota’s employment outlook through 2034, showing moderate overall job growth driven heavily by health care, construction, professional services and self-employment. It also identifies declining sectors and highlights how turnover, education requirements and technology like artificial intelligence is expected to shape workforce needs across industries and occupations.
Artificial Intelligence Mentions in Job Postings
This analysis uses national job postings to examine the prevalence of employer demand for AI skills and knowledge. Findings show that about 8% of job postings in April 2026 included AI mentions, up slightly from six months previous. Mentions were most prevalent in white-collar jobs with education requirements of Bachelor’s degree or above.
Mapping the Next Step: What makes a meaningful career pathway?
Career maps can help workers and students understand how jobs connect and explore potential career moves — but what evidence tells us that two jobs form a realistic pathway? This article explores how labor market data, expert knowledge and information on workers’ actual career moves can work together to answer that question.
Recredentialing the Skilled Immigrant Workforce: Early Lessons from Minnesota’s Recredentialing Pathways Pilot Program
A new Minnesota initiative, Recredentialing Pathways (RCP) for Internationally Trained Professionals, is helping foreign trained professionals re-connect to their chosen careers by removing barriers for individuals and strengthening coordination across the workforce development system. The pilot focuses on four priority sectors — Health Care, Engineering, Education, and Information Technology — and brings together state agencies and non-profits with distinct yet complementary roles. This article examines early lessons from the implementation of the program.
Do Minnesota High School Students’ Career Goals Become Reality? Results from our Student Career Exploration Survey
Using 2025–26 survey results, this article shows how Minnesota students’ career and education plans shift throughout high school and often differ from real post graduation outcomes, underscoring the need for earlier, broader career exploration.