It seems as if Nebraska has a way of finding its place onto most top 10 or top 50 lists of note these days.

Take last year, for example, when Kiplinger named Omaha as a hotspot for starting a business on their list of best cities for entrepreneurs. Nebraska is, quite consistently, rated one of the best places to live, a good place to raise a family, a great place to start a business, and an even better place to work. More than ever, the Midwest is being noticed for its business-friendly environment and high quality of living.

recognized another Nebraska city this week, naming Lincoln one of the cities with the best job markets in 2015.

Lincoln was noted for promising job growth in construction, financial services, state government, manufacturing, and health care, followed by Odessa, Texas for energy, construction, health care, and service sectors, and Minneapolis for health care, tech, food manufacturing, and professional service positions.

Why is this? Well, Leon Tchikindas, data scientist for ZipRecruiter, notes that “smaller and mid-sized metro areas will provide better job opportunities than larger cities along the coasts. What we’ve seen in our data is that there is much lower competition for jobs in smaller markets which, combined with wider trends, creates robust job markets where the ratio of jobseekers to open jobs is as low as six people to one job,” Tchikindas told MainStreet. In other words, Nebraska’s population size is working for us.

To determine these rankings, ZipRecruiter analyzed 1.9 million active job postings, noting that most prevalent open jobs are within the retail, insurance, and construction sectors. Specifically, the most posted jobs are local truck drivers, insurance sales, tax professionals, nurse practitioners, and master merchandisers. And, as to be expected, the shale-oil boom in the upper Midwest has certainly reverberated into job growth: “The boost shale-oil boom in the upper Midwest can be seen most directly in the strong demand for trucking and transportation workers, but the booming economy is also contributing to regional hiring in education, health care, construction, and manufacturing,” said Tchikindas.

This rankings comes on the heels of the report that 2015 will be a banner year for job hirings in the U.S. Already, faculty members and counselors at campus career centers in Nebraska and Iowa say they’ve seen a noticeable jump in employer attendance at career fairs, with Creighton University even having to turn away employers for the fall career fair because the ballroom could only hold 100. According to Eric Thompson, a UNL economist and director of its Bureau of Business Research, the job market has returned to normal. Thompson also notes that graduates who want to stay in Nebraska, or alumni who went out-of-state several years ago for work, should be able to find opportunities here in the state.

In other words: if you want to be employed, 2015 is the year to do it, and Nebraska is the place to be.

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