Experimental statistics

Labour market demand for ICT specialists in online job advertisements

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Why are these statistics needed?

Digitalisation is transforming societies and economies. It facilitates global outreach for business, their interaction with customers and business partners and it helps them streamline and optimise their operations.

Consequently – by changing many occupations and work-related tasks – digitalisation has an impact on the labour market. Digital technologies are increasingly applied in professional activities. Thus, there is a growing need for qualified personnel who are able to deal with increasingly technology- and data-intensive working environments.

The statistics on the labour market demand for ICT specialists in online job advertisements (OJAs) provide detailed and timely information on this topic.

Why are they experimental?

These statistics are experimental because the primary data source is information which comes from web scraping of OJAs posted on the internet, using natural language processing.

OJAs provide detailed information on:

the positions employers are seeking to fill
the skills sought for those jobs
other characteristics of the job offered and the employer, such as location, sector of economic activity, type of contract, etc.

The dataset has a large coverage in terms of job postings as web-scraping collects all OJAs referenced by web portals selected by the web intelligence hub (WIH).

However, the coverage of the web portals is not exhaustive, meaning the web scraping does not cover all potential web portals posting job advertisements. Thus, the selection of web portals might have a significant impact on the quality of the data output and the comparability across time and countries.

Moreover, it is to be assumed that the OJA source is biased with regard to economic activities and occupations: certain positions are likely to be advertised online more than others. For example, IT positions are more likely to be advertised on the internet than jobs in small shops, such as butchers or bakeries, or in the retail trade sector.

Another shortcoming is the possible multiple counting of the same add if it was posted in several web portals. However, the algorithms are progressively improved to eliminate redundant OJAs.

Furthermore, the data is heavily dependent on the keyword selection as well as language and quality of the classifications' translation into national languages. This is because the data is built using natural language processing of the information retrieved from the web, classified into several variables, of which some according to existing classifications.

The complexity and the amount of data that has to be classified in the data processing phase is extremely high.

Therefore, some misclassifications may exist regarding the:

occupation (based on the international standard classification of occupations, ISCO)
skills (based on the European skills, competences, qualifications, and occupations, ESCO)
geographical location (based on the nomenclature of territorial units for statistics, NUTS)
economic activities (based on the statistical classification of economic activities in the European Community, NACE).

In addition, consistency issues between classification levels or data releases may arise. Continuous work is ongoing on the evaluation and quality improvements of the used algorithms.

This primary dataset has the following strengths:

OJAs provide very detailed information on the occupation and skills sought by employers;
OJAs also frequently include additional information about the job for which the vacancy is advertised, such as location, education requirements, working conditions, and characteristics of the employer;
OJAs are particularly appropriate to measure skills demand because they reflect the exact names and labels of the skills sought for by the employers posting the job advertisement;
Timeliness is a big advantage of this data source, as the data is available at the earliest 1 month after the end of the reference period.

How are they produced?

The statistics are derived from the OJAs dataset by calculating the shares of OJAs for ICT specialists in the total number of OJAs as well as the percentage growth of the number of OJAs for ICT specialists in a quarter compared to the same period of the previous year.

For deriving the statistics on the labour market demand for ICT specialists in OJAs, the number of OJAs published during the reference period is used.

It is important to note that the data from OJAs should not be compared to the job vacancies statistics. Firstly, the source dataset of OJAs, which is used for producing indicators on labour market demand for ICT specialists in OJAs, is referring only to the online postings of job positions and does not cover job offers advertised outside of the internet.

Secondly, OJAs are not equivalent to job vacancies. The 2 concepts are related, but there may be vacancies that are not advertised, or some employers post job advertisements even if they don't intend to fill their vacancy immediately or within a specific period of time, or it might happen that one online job advertisement refers to several vacancies at the same time.

An overview on the applied methodology is provided in the methodological note.

Access to the statistics

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Feedback

To help Eurostat improve these experimental statistics, users and researchers are kindly invited to give us their feedback by email:

How useful are the statistics on labour market demand for ICT specialists?
What do you use the statistics for?
Would you have any comments or suggestions for improving the pilot methodology?
What sort of analysis based on statistics on labour market demand for ICT specialists would bring added value in your field?