Urban employment in post-transition economies: skill mismatch in the local labor market

The paper explores the mismatch between the skills and qualifications required by the labour market and those acquired through education and on-the-job learning. The skill mismatch in transition economies tends to be even more pronounced as the labour markets in these countries are characterized by structural unemployment, affecting both older workers with obsolete skills and the young ones. Employers face poor incentives for investing in workforce skill development, due to the inadequate investment climate and volatile business environment. Transition countries face increasing outward mobility of an educated workforce, loss of human capital, and shortage of workforce in the fields such as ICT, medicine, science and research. The research is based on empirical data generated in a survey on ICT and manufacturing enterprises in the City of Niš, Serbia. The research methodology combines workers' self-assessment method for the skill gap measurement and the competence approach combined with the statistical methods. The findings indicate the presence of a qualification mismatch, in the form of the over-qualification as a dominant irregularity in the analysed labour market. The results of the study are expected to contribute to creating a network of policy instrumentaria that tend to be effective on a sub-national level in addressing the mismatch.

Skill set issues in aircraft maintenance from industrial revolution 4.0 context: A document analytics survey

BACKGROUND: Aircraft maintenance and repair are critical tasks in the aviation industry for improved aircraft service and safety. Many articles and reports describe personnel factor and skill issues contribute to many aircraft incidents. Aircraft maintenance personnel needs to level up their skill set to match with task requirements in the setting of Industry Revolution 4.0. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to investigate document set that describe human errors and skill mismatch as a human factor in aircraft incidents and problems. It also discusses on the findings and management of the aircraft maintenance skill issues. METHODS: The study uses a document analytics tool to assess a set of online articles that discuss aircraft maintenance incidents and skill mismatch issues. The experiment is divided into four (4) modules: I collection of online articles and reports, (ii) document pre-processing, (iii) text analytics, and (iv) visualisation. RESULTS: The experiment’s results show that the majority of documents discuss aircraft maintenance, skill mismatch, and training gaps. CONCLUSION: We can conclude that the document dataset primarily discusses aircraft maintenance and skill set issues using the document analytics. Consequently, the management of aircraft maintenance workforce skill set issues by having initiatives for upskilling and reskilling Furthermore, firms should foster a culture of continuous learning and develop a mindset among their employees that allows them to adapt to new technologies and information in aircraft maintenance.

Trends in Educational and Skill Mismatch in the United States

We examined trends in the incidence and correlates of educational and skill mismatch in the United States. We focused on trends over time in the associations between various types of mismatch and a range of factors including contextual conditions. We explored whether contextual conditions at the transitional period from school to jobs increase or decrease the probability of mismatch and whether such relationships persist throughout the working career. Our central questions were how the incidence of and relationship between educational and skill mismatch in the U.S. changed between 1994, 2003, and 2012 and how this differed by age, gender, immigration status, educational attainment, and occupation. We used three cross-sectional surveys that had not previously been implemented for such an effort. These were the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) in 1994, the Adult Literacy and Life-skills (ALL) survey in 2003, and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in 2012. Repeated cross-sectional data provided us with substantial analytic leverage. Our findings point toward the key role of occupational or positional factors rather than individual worker characteristics as being most implicated in trends in mismatch. We describe the importance of our results for labor market theories.

Mismatched, but Not Aware of It? How Subjective and Objective Skill Mismatch Affects Employee Job Satisfaction

Several studies suggest that skill mismatch reduces job satisfaction. To date, research has primarily investigated the impact of subjective skill mismatch; the impact of objective skill mismatch has less commonly been analysed and has generally only focused on mismatches in single skills. The present study addresses the question of whether both subjective and objective skill mismatch reduces employee job satisfaction. This article contributes to previous research by disentangling the effects of objective and subjective skill mismatch on job satisfaction based on a multidimensional measure of objective skill mismatch among employees in Germany. Based on the 2018 wave of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) Adult Cohort, multiple linear regression models are herein estimated in order to investigate how subjective and objective skill mismatches affect people’s job satisfaction. The findings indicate that subjectively skill mismatched employees are less satisfied with their job than matched employees to a statistically significant degree, even when controlling for the objective mismatch. However, objectively skill mismatched employees do not show statistically significant lower job satisfaction compared to matched employees. Although there is considerable dissonance between objective mismatches and the subjective perception of being mismatched, the findings suggest that skill mismatch only reduces job satisfaction when employees perceive themselves to be mismatched.

Skill Mismatch Assessment: Example of Software Industry in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Concept of skill mismatch is very broad and can be measured using a variety of indicators. It is used to describe so-called vertical mismatches (over-education, under-education, excessive or insufficient training), skills gaps, skills shortages, enrolment policy or ‘horizontal’ mismatches and skills obsolescence. In this paper we are analyzing skill mismatch gaps and skills shortages in software industry in Bosnia and Herzegovina using firm level assessment. The research results provide clear evidence for severe skill shortages facing IT companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Inadequate tertiary education enrolment policy results in numerous vacancies in software industry, especially for developer’s positions. The evidence of skills gaps are also found. Primarily as a result of inadequate curricula in higher education institutions. The problem of skill gaps is most prominent referring professional (technical) skills, but also some ‘soft’ skills, such as the ability to work with clients, communication skills, problem detection and solving, etc. In a broad group of professional (technical) skills the biggest gaps are found in a sub-group related to fundamental knowledge of programming languages and IT systems, and sub-group related to experience in working with complementary tools and project management. In a way this was expected having in mind the stage of development of software industry in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Identified skill gaps and skill shortages are somewhat lower for non-IT employees. Based on the research findings several policy options are discussed.

Skills2Graph: Processing million Job Ads to face the Job Skill Mismatch Problem

In this paper, we present Skills2Graph, a tool that, starting from a set of users’ professional skills, identifies the most suitable jobs as they emerge from a large corpus of 2.5M+ Online Job Vacancies (OJVs) posted in three different countries (the United Kingdom, France, and Germany). To this aim, we rely both on co-occurrence statistics - computing a count-based measure of skill-relevance named Revealed Comparative Advantage (rca) - and distributional semantics - generating several embeddings on the OJVs corpus and performing an intrinsic evaluation of their quality. Results, evaluated through a user study of 10 labor market experts, show a high P@3 for the recommendations provided by Skills2Graph, and a high nDCG (0.985 and 0.984 in a [0,1] range), that indicates a strong correlation between the experts’ scores and the rankings generated by Skills2Graph.