The Market Has Priced In the Skills Gap. Most Institutions Are Still Pretending It Does Not Exist

A March 2026 analysis of live job market data from edtech.com, HigherEdJobs.com, EdTechJobs.io, and Tes.com puts a number on the demand that institutions describe abstractly as a talent challenge. HigherEdJobs alone lists 72,226 active positions across US colleges and universities — 31,809 of them in administrative functions. Of those, approximately 8,200 fall into roles that require the exact operational, analytical, and institutional competencies that no formal program currently prepares candidates to hold. That is 26% of every administrative listing on the largest higher education hiring platform in the United States, filled by people who learned the job by doing it, or who never fully learned it at all. Admissions and enrollment management: 1,049 active roles. Institutional research and assessment: 400 or more. Academic advising with a data-driven mandate: 652. Registrar and records operations: 300 or more. These are not niche functions. They are the operational backbone of every institution on the list.

EdTechJobs.io processed 26,000 job listings in 2025 and generated 578,000 applications across 1,900 employers. Their analysis of AI's presence in job descriptions is the sharpest signal in the dataset: 21% of all EdTech listings now explicitly mention AI skills or an AI-focused remit. In corporate EdTech that figure reaches 31%. In higher education it sits at 24%. In K-12 it is 17% and climbing. What matters is where the AI requirement is appearing: not in job titles, but in descriptions — in product roles, marketing roles, customer success roles, operations roles, curriculum roles. AI fluency is not a specialist credential anymore. It is becoming a baseline expectation across every function in an industry that has spent the last decade treating digital competency as someone else's department.

The European picture, drawn from Tes.com data and ISC Research 2024, adds a dimension that US-centric platforms miss entirely. European higher education employs approximately 2.25 million professionals across roughly 5,000 institutions in the EHEA. UK schools alone account for 1.1 million education professionals across 32,000 institutions. International schools globally — the fastest-growing segment of education, up 55% in the last decade — employ 870,000 staff across 13,500 schools. Combined, the European and international market generates around 220,000 operational role transitions per year, with the School 1 operations cluster alone accounting for 120,000 of them. One of the most structurally exposed roles in the TES taxonomy is the Business Manager — the person who runs school finances, operations, HR, and compliance. In most cases they were appointed from teaching with zero preparation for any of it. There is no formal qualification for this role anywhere in Europe. The gap is not a future concern. It is the current condition.

Across all four platforms, the skills most consistently required are data literacy (present in 40% or more of all listings), AI fluency, CRM and SIS systems proficiency, change management, and process optimization in an academic context. None of those competencies are produced reliably by a generic MBA, an education doctorate, a MOOC subscription, or a consulting certification. A Wharton graduate cannot redesign an enrollment funnel. An EdD holder cannot implement a workflow optimization across an admissions office. A PMP-certified project manager cannot navigate faculty governance. The 3,700 edtech.com roles — 55% of all listings on that platform — that require education domain expertise are being filled by people who acquired that expertise through trial and error, or who have not acquired it at all. The market has priced in the gap. The question for every institution and EdTech company in this sector is how long they intend to pay for it.