As a candidate or during a campaign, you can’t bring about a certain type of policy change. Someone will pull up a chart and say out loud, “Something has changed.” This can happen in spreadsheets, workforce analytics dashboards, or the quiet offices of state labor departments. This is pretty much what’s been going on in Pennsylvania and Nebraska, two states that don’t usually share news stories but are both dealing with a shortage of workers and trying to figure out what to do.
The situation in Pennsylvania has been written about more clearly. The office of Governor Shapiro has been very open about the lack of workers in education, child care, and health care, which are all real areas where people are in short supply. It is said that there are only 77 qualified Pennsylvanians available to fill every 100 open jobs in the state. It’s not a rounding mistake. That is a problem with the structure, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better by itself.
Not as much is said about how Pennsylvania is now showing up in national workforce data for a totally different reason. The Bipartisan Policy Center did an analysis in May 2026 and found that Pennsylvania is one of the states where job postings for AI skills have grown the fastest over the past year. That kind of growth is 144 percent on average across the country. Pennsylvania is doing better than the average. That’s something to think about because it means that businesses in the state aren’t just posting jobs. People who want to work for them need to know something about natural language processing, machine learning, or generative AI. At this point, it’s still not clear if the labor pool is big enough to meet the demand.
When Nebraska does well, it’s harder to tell the story. In April 2026, the Washington Post said that the state’s economy had “stalled out.” This was a place that used to be a leader in job creation though it is no longer. Nebraska used to have a reputation for being stable, with slow but steady growth and a job market that didn’t boom or bust. That reputation is now worn down. Some analysts think that the state’s traditional industries haven’t changed fast enough and that the workforce pipeline—what students are learning and what employers need—has become less aligned.
This kind of misalignment is what tools like the BPC’s AI and Workforce Navigator are meant to show. The Skills Data Dashboard uses job data from the company Lightcast to keep an eye on the demand for skills related to AI in more than 300 different areas, such as robotics, AI ethics and governance, and prompt engineering. Every day, the data is updated. It includes every state, every big city, and even small cities where the numbers can change a lot from one quarter to the next. There are some flaws in the picture, but it’s more detailed than most state policymakers have seen before.
The dashboard shows that people across the country need AI skills, not just in California, New York, or other tech-heavy states. There are a lot more job postings about AI in finance, higher education, engineering, and accounting. That part gets lost in the bigger conversation about AI and jobs. It’s not just programmers. There are accountants in Omaha. It’s people who make lessons in Pittsburgh.
It remains to be seen whether Pennsylvania and Nebraska will use their knowledge of data to change their policies. Being aware of a gap is not the same as closing it. But it’s interesting to note that these two states—one where demand for AI skills is rising and the other where the economy is struggling—are both in the middle of a national conversation about the workforce that’s moving faster than most state governments do. They can see what’s going on in the dashboard. No one has yet made a plan for what they will do next.
