A quarterly publication of AQU Catalunya

94

July 2019

The requirements of the labour market have transformed over time mainly in occupations where technological change has had an important impact on job tasks and functions. As a result, enterprises have gradually adapted the skills requirements for new recruitment and staff training according to their new needs.

One of the major difficulties facing the main economic and social agents is being able to identify in advance the trend of skills requirements in the labour market. Such information is crucial for enhancing an agent's adaptability to changing requirements.

At European level there are currently a number of initiatives underway to address this information need by analysing online job offers using a methodology known as web scraping to extract real time information on online job postings (job data feeds). There has so far been no public initiative to provide this information in Spain. In response to this need, AQU Catalunya, in conjunction with Obra Social La Caixa, is setting up a Catalan Talent Observatory portal.

The aim of the web portal is provide a source of publicly available information on the characteristics of online job postings in Catalonia. Text mining will be used as the methodology, which involves analysis of the features of recently posted job offers to derive high-quality information from text.

This information is meant for use by different economic and social entities, such as job and employment agencies, associations and unions, government and public authorities and education institutions, the aim being for these agents to have an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the labour market.

The availability of such a source of information:

• provides a rapid understanding of emerging trends in the labour market
• provides an understanding of the new requirements of enterprises for improving the focus of active training policies
• draws the attention of both enterprises and employees to emerging trends in the labour market and the need to better define their business development plans
• provides detailed information on the labour market as a starting point for dialogue between the different agents involved, including educational institutions, government and public authorities, etc. Wollybi in Italy offers a good example of how the information on job data feeds is displayed.

The Catalan Talent Observatory will serve to complete the information on the Government of Catalonia/Generalitat de Catalunya's Employment and occupations website, a product of the Labour Market and Production Model Observatory that makes information on the labour market available for people to make future career choices.