Everything You Need to Know About Emsi APIs and 3 Higher Education Use Cases

What if you could strengthen your program marketing, academic advising, and career services in one move? And what if you could do that by designing your own graphics around the data sets that power comprehensive labor market analysis tools? Many Emsi clients are already doing just that with Emsi APIs.

What is an API?

An API (application programming interface) is a set of programming functions that lets you build interfaces and software with data from another application or service. 

Emsi APIs give you access to the same labor market data behind software platforms like Analyst and Career Coach. This is the most up-to-date labor market data that includes information on industries, occupations, job postings, compensation, program completions, demographics, worker profiles, assessments, and staffing patterns. 

In our APIs, you can use this raw data to build your own dashboards and webpages, generate questionnaires to guide students into the right academic programs, and create tools to help them find jobs after graduation. In other words, you get to customize how you present the data to your students and community members, as well as how the users will interact with that data.

The result? 

Personalized LMI software for your students and community members, with the best data available and 100% brand continuity.

Three ways to use Emsi APIs

The ways to leverage and integrate Emsi APIs are endless. But within higher education, we’ve identified three use cases that consistently appear in our clients’ integrations.

1. Connect student interests to programs and careers

• Primary function: to guide students and potential students who are unsure about what career or program they’re interested in through an interest assessment.
• Based on their assessment results, students are shown jobs that match their interests and the programs that will prepare them for those jobs.  
• Students can browse useful career information: salary, required education, companies that are hiring, and more.

2. Career data on program pages

• Primary function: to integrate labor market data directly into individual program pages. Providing this information is highly valuable to students (both prospective and current) and boosts program marketing. 
• This integration is valuable to students because it shows them their possible post-graduation career outcomes. It’s particularly helpful for prospective students who already know what program and field they wish to pursue, and it also helps motivate current students to keep up their hard work.
• You can include data points like recent job postings and titles, average salary, job growth, locations, and more to highlight the real-world value of different programs and give students a clear-cut path to relevant jobs.
• You can even integrate career search options by region so that online and out-of-state students can see  data that applies to them in their area.

3. Internal dashboards & research

• Primary function: to build internal dashboards or provide extra data in existing applications and reports. 
• Emsi APIs pipe in the necessary data for more effective decision-making regarding program relevancy, institutional effectiveness, and more.
• You can design interfaces to filter search results by different levels of granularity: as broad as the workforce cluster level, or all the way down to job titles.
• You can also create an internal interface and give external parties access so they can use the data for labor market research.

Why Emsi APIs?

There are multiple benefits to using APIs in your web design and interfaces.

Seamless integration – Maintain 100% brand continuity while harnessing the power of Emsi’s robust datasets.

Maximum flexibility – Mix and match data sources to build graphics and dashboards exactly the way you want.

Always up-to-date – Automatically display the latest available data on your interface.

Developer-friendly – Dive straight into integrations using tutorials and code samples, thanks to our thorough documentation.

Have questions? Want to see real-world API integrations? Feel free to reach out to our API product specialist, Isaac Neace.