Responsible team players wanted: an analysis of soft skill requirements in job advertisements

Abstract

During the past decades the importance of soft skills for labour market outcomes has grown substantially. This carries implications for labour market inequality, since previous research shows that soft skills are not valued equally across race and gender. This work explores the role of soft skills in job advertisements by drawing on methods from computational science as well as on theoretical and empirical insights from economics, sociology and psychology. We present a semi-automatic approach based on crowdsourcing and text mining for extracting a list of soft skills. We find that soft skills are a crucial component of job ads, especially of low-paid jobs and jobs in female-dominated professions. Our work shows that soft skills can serve as partial predictors of the gender composition in job categories and that not all soft skills receive equal wage returns at the labour market. Especially "female" skills are frequently associated with wage penalties. Our results expand the growing literature on the association of soft skills on wage inequality and highlight their importance for occupational gender segregation at labour markets.

Occupational profiling driven by online job advertisements: Taking the data analysis and processing engineering technicians as an example

“…Fig 5 shows the top words of core skills (general skills) required by DAPET. The abilities mentioned focused on communication ability, sense of responsibility, logical thinking, teamwork spirit, responsibility and other soft skills [ 35 ]. Fig 6 shows the top professional skills required by the occupation, including data analysis ability, data sensitivity and data analysis tools such as Excel, SQL, Python and SPSS.…”

Supply chain and logistics controller – two promising professions for supporting transparency in supply chain management

“…There are many publications from various fields, which use this technique to better understand the overall conditions of the studied phenomenon and, on this basis, make assessments and do further in-depth research. It is worth noting that job advertisements reflect the needs of business, the labour market and education (Calanca et al , 2019; Brooks et al , 2018; Dziobczenski et al , 2018).…”

A Survey on Skill Identification From Online Job Ads

“…In [38], the authors examined soft skills required by women and men in job ads and found that soft skills are associated with gender segregation across occupations and reinforce wage inequalities between men and women by rewarding typically "male" characteristics and penalizing "female" traits. In [139], the authors examined how job seekers react to requirements in job ads.…”