Is Education & Training a Good Job Market in Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD?

Executive Verdict

Market rating: competitive | Confidence: High

Philadelphia is still a real Education & Training market, not a dead one: metro unemployment was 4.1% in June 2026, education and health services employment reached 759.6 thousand and was up 2.1792% year over year, and we observed more than 2,000 postings across more than 350 companies over the last 90 days.[25][26][7] But it is not an easy market. Revelio Public Labor Statistics shows Pennsylvania education & training postings down 11.3% year over year even as statewide education employment rose 1.1%, which usually means fewer fresh openings per applicant than a year ago.[27][28] The best near-term odds are in on-site K-12, school-year staffing, higher-ed administration, and healthcare-linked education roles rather than remote-only instructional-design searches.[29][30][8]

Best positioned: Candidates who can work on-site, already meet school or subject-matter requirements, and can show classroom management, lesson planning, curriculum execution, and student-assessment results have the best odds right now.[8][12]

Main caution: Do not anchor on six-figure administrator pay; the broader posting market centers much lower, around about $56k to $71k, and most openings are entry or mid-level.[4][9][2][3]

What Changed Recently

• The Philadelphia School District restored 340 classroom-based jobs in June 2026, including 149 teachers, 130 climate staff, and 23 counselors.[31]: That reduced one major local downside risk and improved the odds for school-based applicants heading into the academic year.
• Philadelphia metro education and health services employment reached 759.6 thousand in June 2026 and was up 2.1792% year over year.[26]: That supports continued hiring across schools, universities, hospitals, and other education-adjacent institutions.
• Pennsylvania education & training postings were down 11.3% year over year in July 2026 even as education employment in the state was up 1.1%.[27][28]: Open roles still exist, but the opening flow is thinner than last summer, so expect more competition per posting.
• Beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, every Pennsylvania high school must offer a standalone personal finance course worth at least 0.5 credit, with standards taking effect July 1, 2026.[17]: That creates a timely niche for candidates who can teach or support personal-finance content.
• U.S. nonfarm employment was 158858 thousand in July 2026, up 0.1993% year over year.[23]: The national labor market is still expanding, but slowly, which usually means employers keep hiring while moving more selectively.

What This Means for You

Entry-Level Candidates

Difficulty: Moderate to high.

Best target: On-site classroom, early-childhood, paraprofessional-to-teacher, and independent or parochial school openings that value classroom management, lesson planning, child development, and curriculum implementation.[8][12][10][37][38]

Biggest mistake: Applying only to remote instructional-design jobs when about 95% of local postings are on-site and less than 5% are remote.[8]

Next step: Build a compact evidence packet: one strong lesson plan, one assessment sample, one classroom-management example, and one short note explaining your availability for the 2026-2027 school year.[12][10]

Mid-Career Candidates

Difficulty: Competitive.

Best target: Higher-ed administration, school-network central-office roles, and healthcare education roles tied to active employers such as University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine, Archdiocese of Philadelphia Schools, Rowan University, and Jefferson Health.[29]

Biggest mistake: Leading with generic years of experience instead of measurable outcomes in curriculum delivery, staff development, student assessment, or program execution.[12][19]

Next step: Rewrite your resume around outcomes and target larger employers first, because about 45% of local postings in the sample come from enterprise employers.[18]

Career Switchers

Difficulty: High unless you bring subject expertise, facilitation, or youth-facing experience.

Best target: Education employers outside the classic district path, especially healthcare and colleges or universities, which together account for about 20% of local category activity.[30]

Biggest mistake: Assuming a skills-first story will fully replace credentials; among postings that state an education requirement, bachelor's degrees are most common and postgraduate or master's requirements still appear regularly.[39]

Next step: Pick one lane—K-12, higher ed, or training—and build a portfolio with facilitation, curriculum, and assessment artifacts plus one AI-assisted lesson or training module.[12][13][14][19]

Salary Reality

high pay highly concentrated

Government pay anchors and live-posting pay tell different parts of the story. For the broader Educational Instruction and Library group, the metro mean wage was $34.25/hour in May 2023.[1] A much narrower local benchmark—education administrators, all other—showed a median annual wage of $151,640 in May 2025, with a 25th-to-75th percentile hourly band of $33.02 to $72.85.[2][3] By contrast, recent posting-based pay in the metro centers on about $56k to $71k, with a broader 25th-to-75th band of about $47k to $93k, and hourly-paid postings center on about $18 to $21 / hour.[4][5]

That usually means the typical open role pays more like a teacher, support instructor, or program staff job than a senior administrator job. Pennsylvania's mean offered salary on new education & training openings was about $53,133 in July 2026, versus about $75,569 across all occupations statewide, so posted education pay is not consistently leading the broader market.[6]

The tradeoff is stability and volume versus flexibility. There are still more than 2,000 postings in the recent sample, but about 95% are on-site and most openings are entry or mid-level, so pay upside often comes with administrative scope, advanced credentials, or specialized subject matter.[7][8][9]

Best-paying path: The strongest pay tends to sit in education administration, higher-ed leadership, central-office roles, and some corporate or healthcare training tracks. Local proxy listings included a School District of Philadelphia central-office role starting from $88,606 and a classroom role at $55,771 to $97,852, while the national median for training and development specialists was $65,850.[10][11]

Caution: Do not treat the $151,640 administrator figure as the local norm. It is a narrow occupation, not the whole Education & Training market, and it sits far above the posting-centered middle of the market.[2][4]

Where the Opportunities Are Concentrated

Opportunity is spread across schools, universities, hospitals, and childcare rather than one dominant buyer. We observed more than 2,000 postings across more than 350 companies over the last 90 days, and hiring is fragmented across employers in the sample.[7][36] The biggest named employers included University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine, Archdiocese of Philadelphia Schools, Upenn, Kreyco Inc., Rowan University, Jefferson Health, and Goddard School.[29] Most activity still sits in education itself: about 75% of local postings were in education, with about 10% in healthcare and smaller shares in colleges and universities, hospital and health care, and sports and recreation.[30] That matches current local signals showing school-year hiring at KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools, Independence Mission Schools, The Community of St. James, and independent schools such as Springside Chestnut Hill Academy and William Penn Charter School.[10][37][38] For job seekers, the key is to search by employer type, not just title. School-year classroom staffing, higher-ed and medical-center instruction, and education administration are producing more realistic openings than remote-only instructional-design searches.

• K-12 and school-year staffing (high): This is the clearest near-term lane, with active signals from KIPP Philadelphia Public Schools, Independence Mission Schools, The Community of St. James, and the School District's restoration of 340 classroom-based jobs.[10][37][31]
• Higher education and university administration (moderate): Universities remain meaningful buyers through employers such as University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine, Upenn, and Rowan University.[29]
• Healthcare-linked education (moderate): This is smaller but real: about 10% of local category activity comes from healthcare, and Jefferson Health is one of the named active employers.[30][29]
• Remote-only instructional design and corporate learning (limited): This is the hardest lane locally because about 95% of postings are on-site and less than 5% are remote, even though training and development specialists have a positive national outlook.[8][11]

Where to focus: Prioritize on-site K-12 and higher-ed or admin roles first, then add healthcare education; treat remote-only instructional design as a secondary search.

Skills and Credentials Worth Pursuing

• Classroom management (table stakes): It is the most-requested hard skill in local postings at about 35%, so employers often treat it as the baseline proof that you can handle a room and keep instruction moving.[12]
• Lesson planning and curriculum implementation (table stakes): Local postings repeatedly ask for lesson planning and curriculum implementation, each appearing in about 15% of the sample.[12]
• Student assessment (differentiator): Student assessment appears among the most-requested hard skills, which makes evidence of rubrics, progress monitoring, or intervention design more valuable than generic teaching language.[12]
• Degree and subject-matter alignment (table stakes): Among postings that state an education requirement, bachelor's degrees are most common at about 45%, with postgraduate degrees at about 15% and master's degrees at about 10%.[39]
• First aid (differentiator): It is the most frequently named certification in the local sample, especially relevant for early-childhood, youth, and safety-sensitive settings.[16]
• AI-assisted content creation tools (differentiator): Teachers are using tools such as Brisk Teaching, Gemini, Google NotebookLM, Canva for Education, and MagicSchool AI, and 87% of L&D practitioners reported using AI in 2026, so basic AI-assisted content creation is moving from novelty to expected fluency.[13][14]
• Learning experience design and data literacy (premium): These are among the key L&D skills cited for 2026, alongside AI collaboration, skills mapping, and translating business goals into measurable learning outcomes.[19] Strategic and critical thinking is identified as the top L&D skill by 56% of responders.[20]
• Personal finance instruction (differentiator): Pennsylvania now requires every high school to offer a standalone personal finance course worth at least 0.5 credit starting in the 2026-2027 school year.[17]

Adjacent Roles to Consider

• School operations or central-office coordinator (bridge): Local hiring includes both central-office and school-based roles, so applicants with education context can sometimes bridge into operations, scheduling, compliance, or program support.[10]
• Academic program coordinator (both): Universities and university-linked employers such as University Of Pennsylvania School Of Medicine, Upenn, and Rowan University are active in the local market.[29]
• Healthcare program educator or onboarding coordinator (both): Healthcare represents about 10% of local category activity, and Jefferson Health is a named active employer, so education skills can transfer into staff onboarding, patient education, or clinical-program support.[30][29]
• Customer education or enablement specialist (pivot): Training and development specialists are the closest official proxy for corporate learning roles in the available labor data, and the occupation has an 11% national growth outlook.[11]

30 / 60 / 90-Day Plan

First 30 Days

• Split your search into three saved lanes: K-12 or school-year staffing, higher-ed or academic administration, and healthcare education. Do not run one blended search and hope the market sorts it out.
• Rewrite your resume around evidence, not duties: classroom management, lesson planning, curriculum implementation, student assessment, and one quantified outcome per role.[12]
• Create a compact portfolio with one lesson plan, one assessment artifact, one facilitation sample, and one AI-assisted teaching or training asset that you can explain clearly.[12][13][14]
• Apply early and consistently to on-site roles; the typical active local posting has been open around 33 days, so waiting two or three weeks costs visibility.[15]

Days 31-60

• If you want early-childhood or youth-facing work, add first aid and put it near the top of your resume.[16]
• Build one personal-finance mini-unit or sample syllabus if you can teach secondary content in Pennsylvania.[17]
• Target enterprise employers first for mid-career or admin roles, because about 45% of local postings in the sample come from enterprise employers.[18]
• For training or instructional-design pivots, add one project that shows learning experience design, data literacy, and AI collaboration rather than only slide-building.[19][20]

Days 61-90

• If interviews are thin, broaden into adjacent roles such as school operations, academic program coordination, healthcare onboarding, or customer education instead of repeating the same teacher-title search.
• Add a second employer-type lane if you started narrow: for example, pair district or charter applications with universities and hospitals.
• If you need credential momentum or recent local signal, look at Philadelphia-based professional-development options such as the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia or preparation pathways such as Drexel's Philadelphia Teacher Residency.[21][22]
• By this point, drop any remote-only strategy unless it is producing results; the local mix remains overwhelmingly on-site.[8]

Methodology and Confidence

This July 2026 report was generated on August 10, 2026. Latest direct national data: July 2026. Latest direct Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD data: August 2026.

Confidence: Overall confidence: High. Based on 8 direct local occupation data points and 25 total local evidence items with recent coverage.

Limitations

• Some of the strongest Philadelphia occupation wage benchmarks available for this category are for broad occupation groups or for a narrow administrator occupation, so they are more useful for ranking pay tiers than for predicting a specific offer on your next application.
• This page combines teachers, faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and training-first learning roles, so demand can look very different depending on whether you are aiming at K-12, higher ed, or corporate-style training work.
• Statewide occupation trend data was used as a proxy where metro-level occupation-specific hiring trend data was not published, so Pennsylvania's posting direction may not match Philadelphia perfectly month to month.
• The Callings.ai job database is a partial, deduplicated sample of online postings, so direction of demand, leading employer names, and skill patterns are more reliable than exact posting counts or exact employer shares.
• Some recent local year-over-year labor-market changes are preliminary and can be revised, so treat small month-to-month differences with caution.

References

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Educational Instruction and Library Occupations · 2024-04 · bls.gov
2. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment and Wages in Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington — May 2025 · 2026-04 · bls.gov
3. Onetonline. Pennsylvania Wages: 11-9039.00 - Education Administrators, All Other · 2025-08 · onetonline.org
4. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
5. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
6. Reveliolabs. Salaries — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com
7. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
8. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
9. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
10. Newsbreak. 🎓 Multiple Education & Training Roles Hiring Now in Philadelphia - NewsBreak · 2026-08 · newsbreak.com
11. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Training and Development Specialists · 2025-03 · bls.gov
12. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
13. Briskteaching. The 6 Best AI Tools for Teachers in 2026 (And When to Use Each One) - Brisk Teaching Blog · 2026-06 · briskteaching.com
14. Synthesia. AI in Instructional Design: How IDs Are Using AI in 2026 · 2026-04 · synthesia.io
15. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
16. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
17. Digital-skills-jobs. OECD Digital Education Outlook 2026: how generative AI can support learning when used with purpose · 2026-02 · digital-skills-jobs.europa.eu
18. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
19. Thirst. L&D Skills of the Future: 12 Essential Skills for 2026 | Thirst · 2026-07 · thirst.io
20. Absorbai. L&D trends 2026: Strategic and critical thinking is the #1 skill | Absorb LMS Software · 2026-06 · absorbai.com
21. Phennd. Announcing the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia 2026-27 Program | PHENND — Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development · 2026-07 · phennd.org
22. Drexel. Teacher Residency Programs in Philadelphia, PA | Drexel - School of Education · 2026-06 · drexel.edu
23. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-07 · data.bls.gov
24. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-04 · data.bls.gov
25. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
26. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bureau of Labor Statistics Data · 2026-06 · data.bls.gov
27. Reveliolabs. Job Openings — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com
28. Reveliolabs. Employment — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com
29. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
30. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
31. Inquirer. Philly School District will not make 340 classroom job cuts after all, mayor announces · 2026-06 · inquirer.com
32. Nj. Nj - warn_notice_layoff · 2026-07 · nj.gov
33. Data. Data - warn_notice_layoff · 2026-07 · data.phillyburbs.com
34. Reveliolabs. Mass-layoff Notices — Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) · 2026-07 · reveliolabs.com
35. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
36. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai
37. Stjamesphila. Job Opportunities - The Community of St. James · 2026-07 · stjamesphila.org
38. Jobs. Faculty / Classroom Openings jobs | ADVIS | Advancing Independent Schools · 2026-06 · jobs.advis.org
39. Callings.ai. Callings.ai job-market aggregation · 2026-07 · callings.ai

Live Openings in This Market

This report is published monthly; its companion page tracks the active Education & Training openings in Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD from the live Callings.ai job index. Browse current Education & Training openings in Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD.