University of Brighton, Universität Zürich, and Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung

Date
13 October 2022

Place
University of Brighton, City Campus, Grand Parade Building (Room 202), Brighton, BN2 0JY

Directions: Grand Parade

 About

Job adverts include detailed descriptions of skills, knowledge and behaviours relevant to carry out occupational and professional roles in firms.  In addition, they (occasionally) show earnings information, provide firm characteristics and contextualise to local labour markets.  Such data, validly extracted from job adverts, are an invaluable resource to inform education and labour market policy about crucial aspects of matching job seekers and vacancies and, together with further data sources, likely returns from skills investment and potential skills shortages affecting different sectors or localities in the economy.

With improving information technologies, online job search engines grew since the 1980s.  Since then they created huge amounts of data, which can be used to provide systematic descriptions of job skills at a granular level and to understand changes affecting occupational roles.  However, the use of such sources for research in economics, business and education only emerged recently with better availability of off-the-shelves packages for text analytics allowing individual researchers to navigate the complexities of unstructured “big” data and to derive high-quality structured information from millions of vacancies.  And finally, the analytical work for descriptions and econometric modelling offers new opportunities and challenges as with many “Big Data” applications.

Our workshop aims at interested researchers working with such data, with a focus on the analysis of knowledge, skills and behaviours relevant to jobs.  A non-exhaustive list of topics includes:

  • Understanding broader or specific aspects of skills from vacancy data, for example specific to tasks, jobs, sectors or localities
  • Longitudinal studies on changes in occupational profiles and skills requirements
  • Topical research about skills changes, e.g. resulting from decarbonisation or increasing digitalisation of job roles
  • Understanding skills relevant to making transitions into the labour market, for example data used in vocational education institutions and universities from placements
  • Methodological innovations in the work with large data from online vacancies