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ABSTRACT
Universities and educators need to stay abreast of the rapidly changing job market to prepare students to be market ready. There is a growing disconnect between the education higher institutions offer and the skills employers seek. In this paper, through a content analysis of job advertisements using data mining techniques, we identify patterns underlying technical competencies for business jobs by discipline and location. We provide both a visualization as well as a descriptive analysis of our findings. Our findings highlight sought after technical skills such as programming languages and data analytics tools, as well as the regional variation in job availability. The findings underscore the importance of updating university curricula to align with market demands, providing actionable insights for students, educators, employees, and policymakers.
Keywords: Text mining, Business intelligence, Technical skills, Content analysis, Curriculum revision
1. INTRODUCTION
As industries and technologies evolve, so do the nature of jobs and the way they are performed; thus, the skills required for those professions change. This necessitates re-evaluating the base-level skill needs on a regular basis (Wierschem & Méndez Mediavilla, 2018). Universities and educators need to stay abreast of the rapidly changing job market to prepare students to be market-ready (Aoun, 2017). There is a growing disconnect between the education higher institutions are offering and the skills employers are seeking (AACU, 2018; Behn et al., 2012; Borner et al., 2018; Donovan et al., 2022; Nguyen et al., 2020; Radovilsky & Hedge, 2022; Smith & Ali, 2014). Universities must introduce rapidly growing and highly in demand technologies to satisfy organizational demands and educate their students for a world in which they efficiently integrate new skills such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) with human intelligence (Topi, 2019). This is often alluded to as the "expectations" and "skills" gap referring to what are considered important skills by industry and what is taught in the curriculum. While this gap covers a diverse set of soft and hard skills, however, nowhere is this gap more evident than as it relates to technical competencies that are rapidly evolving because of the digital revolution. For example, in addition to identifying the critical skills required by the analytics job market, various studies address the gaps between job market requirements and capabilities taught in analytics programs...