Labour demand and skill shortages have historically been difficult to assess given the high costs of conducting representative surveys and the inherent delays of these indicators. This is particularly consequential for fast developing skills and occupations, such as those relating to Data Science and Analytics (DSA). This paper develops a data-driven solution to detecting skill shortages from online job advertisements (ads) data. We first propose a method to generate sets of highly similar skills based on a set of seed skills from job ads. This provides researchers with a novel method to adaptively select occupations based on granular skills data. Next, we apply this adaptive skills similarity technique to a dataset of over 6.7 million Australian job ads in order to identify occupations with the highest proportions of DSA skills. This uncovers 306,577 DSA job ads across 23 occupational classes from 2012-2019. Finally, we propose five variables for detecting skill shortages from online job ads: (1) posting frequency;(2) salary levels; (3) education requirements; (4) experience demands; and (5) job ad posting predictability. This contributes further evidence to the goal of detecting skills shortages in realtime. In conducting this analysis, we also find strong evidence of skills shortages in Australia for highly technical DSA skills and occupations. These results provide insights to Data Science researchers, educators, and policy-makers from other advanced economies about the types of skills that should be cultivated to meet growing DSA labour demands in the future.
This research develops a Machine Learning approach able to predict labor shortages for occupations. We compile a unique dataset that incorporates both Labor Demand and Labor Supply occupational data in Australia from 2012 to 2018. This includes data from 1.3 million job advertisements (ads) and 20 official labor force measures. We use these data as explanatory variables and leverage the XGBoost classifier to predict yearly labor shortage classifications for 132 standardized occupations. The models we construct achieve macro-F1 average performance scores of up to 86 per cent. However, the more significant findings concern the class of features which are most predictive of labor shortage changes. Our results show that job ads data were the most predictive features for predicting year-to-year labor shortage changes for occupations. These findings are significant because they highlight the predictive value of job ads data when they are used as proxies for Labor Demand, and incorporated into labor market prediction models. This research provides a robust framework for predicting labor shortages, and their changes, and has the potential to assist policy-makers and businesses responsible for preparing labor markets for the future of work.Manuscript submitted for review to the 21st ACM Conference on Economics & Computation (EC'20).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.