Leveraging big data to meet future skills demand in the labour market

Big data on job roles and applications on online job listings can provide key information about changes in the skills employers require and workers offer, highlights the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in a working paper. 

The authors developed a skills taxonomy that includes three broad categories of skills, cognitive, socioemotional, and manual; as well as 14 sub-categories related to skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, teamwork, communication, and finger dexterity.

The taxonomy captures the skills needed by workers in their jobs and those related to individuals’ attributes and seeks to cover the skills employers request in job ads and those that workers put in their online profiles.

Verónica Escudero, one of the authors of the report, said, “Our aim was to develop a taxonomy that is comprehensive but succinct, suitable for the labour market realities of developing and emerging economies and adapted to online vacancies and applicants’ data, and a methodology to implement it using this big data.”

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Hannah Liepmann, economist and member of the report team, added, “The advantage of our approach is its reliance on data that is currently available in many countries across the world, thereby allowing for country-specific analysis that does not need to assume that occupational skills bundles are the same across countries.”