Using vacancy data to study skills dynamics

Knowing what skills are required by employers when recruiting new workers is an important basis for the work of all labour market actors. In the talk, I will present the project “Machbarkeitsstudie Kompetenz-Kompass”, where we developed a methodology to identify recent hard and soft skill requirements in job ads published on the “BA-Jobbörse” employment website provided by the Federal Employment Agency. We focus on three broad occupational sets with job contents that comprise economic activities such as mechanical engineering, information services, and human health and social work activities. Based on example analyses, we show that our methodology potentially allows us to identify the development of up-to-date skill requirements in job advertisements broken down to job titles, skill levels, and regions. We also developed a methodology for the completion of skill dictionaries with new skill categories and new search terms. Our methodology is also able to support the selection of specific skills according to their relevance in job ads for education providers and training institutions. I conclude the talk with a (short) discussion on the most relevant measures to provide general access to the detailed results and further improvement of our methodology.

Participants and their Roles  Presenter: Dr. Michael Stops
Chair: Janine Berg, Senior Economist, ILO Research Department Discussant: Ana Podjanin, Technical Officer, ILO Employment Policy Department

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