The job vacancies that are displayed across a variety of online sources offer a rich source of information that allows for the monitoring of the trends in the demand of competencies across different occupations.
Despite the importance of these sources, the analysis of this type of information involves many challenges related to the need to bring together different sources of data, as well as with the need to make sense of large volumes of information, that is provided in natural language. Moreover, the text of job ads can be ambiguous and is very heterogeneous in what concerns the volume and the type of information that is displayed.
Being aware of the importance of such sources of information, the Aveiro Labour Observatory has developed a quick response tool, that allows for high-quality automated analysis and displays the competencies demand, building on the information in online job ads. The tool is aligned with the ESCO referential, the taxonomy for qualifications, competencies and occupations in Europe. ESCO offers a classification of the attitudes, competencies, qualifications and occupations that are relevant for the European job market, education and training.
The tool labelled as Competence Board allows for the conduction of specific queries about competencies that are demanded in the job adds for a given territory, or for a specific time interval or a work domain (e.g. digital). The Competence Board offers the query results in an aggregated manner, allowing to overview what are the occupations with more demand, and the competencies associated with the various occupations. The image offers an illustration of the Competence Board and the variety of queries and levels of analysis that can be specified.
In the following infographic you can find the results from the Competence Board concerning the demand for competencies in Aveiro for the last quarter (download pdf document).
