Throughline
We counted the credentials in real job postings. Here's what employers ask for, and what it costs to get it.
Pick a job and a place. Throughline counts the credentials that appear in real job postings for it, prices each one in dollars and study hours, and shows the sample every number came from. Live at career.qavrensolutions.com.
What it is
Throughline is a career-path guide built on counted evidence rather than advice. It reads job postings for a given role and market, tallies which certifications, licences, and clearances employers actually named, and publishes the tally with its sample size and date attached. Every claim on the site carries a receipt: CPA — 10 of 14 postings, sampled 2026-08-02.
Then it prices the path. Exam fees, application fees, typical study hours, renewal cycles. Not a vague roadmap — a bill you can decide against.
What it does well
Shows its working. No number appears without its denominator and the date it was taken. If a page says 71%, it also says 10 of 14, and it says which 14. Competitors give you a confident percentage and no way to check it.
Tells you what not to buy. Credentials that are heavily advertised but barely appear in postings for your specific role get their own section, with the count attached. This is possible for exactly one reason: Throughline sells no courses and takes no fee from any certifying body. Every other tool in this space is a storefront, and a storefront cannot tell you the product is unnecessary.
Refuses to guess. Where the sample is too thin to support a claim, the claim is absent rather than hedged. Where a metro has no local postings, the page says the figures are national instead of quietly passing them off as local. Where the corpus does not reach an occupation at all, the home page lists it as uncovered rather than pretending the gap is not there.
Counts with a dictionary, not a model. Credential matching is exact-name against a maintained catalogue. An LLM deciding whether a posting "mentions CCNA" would be a black box asking to be trusted; a name match is something a reader can verify against the posting themselves. The honesty is architectural, not a policy.
Costs nothing to run. Every page is static, generated at build time from committed data. No database, no runtime API calls, no per-visitor inference bill.
Who it's for
Career changers who know the destination and not the route, and who would like to know the price before committing a year to it.
Anyone about to buy a certification who wants to check, first, whether employers in their city are actually asking for it.
People advising other people — counsellors, veterans' transition staff, union apprenticeship coordinators — who need a number they can point at rather than a hunch.
What it looks like in practice
Someone in Hartford is three years into IT support and wants to move into networking. They open the network engineer page. CCNP appears in 3 of 13 postings, CCNA in 2. The most-asked-for credential on its own runs $300 and about 150 hours; earning everything listed would be $1,000 and 450 hours. Below that, the lower-signal section notes which security certifications the local postings did not ask for, with the counts. They buy one exam voucher instead of a $2,000 bootcamp.
What it's not
It's not a job board. It tells you what employers want; it doesn't send your résumé anywhere.
It's not a course. It points at the certifying body's own page and at local training providers, and takes nothing for doing so.
It's not a census. Every page states the size of its sample, and the samples are small. It is a snapshot with its provenance stapled to it, which is more than the alternatives offer.
Data sources
All public, all licensed for this use, none scraped. O*NET for occupation definitions, CareerOneStop for certification and local training data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics for wages, and public ATS job-board feeds for posting text. LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter are not used and will not be — both prohibit it, and data obtained that way could not be published anyway.
Status
In development. The extraction pipeline, credential catalogue, and static site are built and running against a live corpus of public employer job-board feeds. Coverage is currently strongest in technology and business roles; expanding into healthcare and the skilled trades is gated on a pending data-access request to the National Labor Exchange.