Identifying Critical Skills for the Technical Workplace

Date

2014-12-22

Authors

Rusk, David

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Abstract

Traditional university education in computer science and software engineering focuses on teaching fundamental principles rather than developing skills with particular technologies. The motivation for this approach is that if the student has strong fundamental knowledge then they can learn any technology needed on the job. However, it is becoming increasingly common for employers to look for candidates who already have the desired skills, and expect them to need little to no training or ramp-up time on the job. As a result, students must develop skills with different technologies on their own initiative. However, software development involves an overwhelmingly large number of competing platforms which makes it difficult to decide where to focus one's efforts. In this project I developed a system to analyze job postings to identify key skills, and trends in demand for these skills over time. The results are presented for the public in a web application. The job postings used in the project were from the VIATeC job posting site. VIATeC was supportive of the project and provided positive feedback on the usefulness of the analysis done to date.

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