Abstract:

University students trust that through their studies they are appropriately prepared for being competent to the labour market and land a good position once they get their degree. However, even though universities nowadays offer a wide variety of courses that teach several different skills, their curricula oftentimes fail to meet the ever changing labour market requirements. The reason for this is twofold. On the one hand, in most cases the curriculum is built based on strictly academic criteria, ending up being disconnected from the actual labour market needs, while, on the other hand, it is not updated very often resulting to teaching outdated skills that are no longer desirable by the labour market and do not follow the respective field’s developments.

This publication presents the QualiChain Curriculum Designer, a tool which is being developed under the context of the EU funded project QualiChain that aims to reengineer and disrupt the way that academic and other qualifications are archived, managed and shared as well as provide the computational intelligence that is needed by both the academia and the labour market to analyse data and make informed decisions. The QualiChain Curriculum Designer is an Analytics and Decision Support component that aims to identify and bridge the gap between the skills that are taught in university courses and the ones that are actually in high demand by the labour market. In specific, the QualiChain Curriculum Designer uses labour market data for a specific domain, that have been extracted by several Greek job posting websites and identifies the skills that are in demand. Afterwards, it filters out the skills that are already taught in a specific school, identifies which of the most desirable skills in the labour market are missing from the specific curriculum and detects existing courses that are relevant to these skills and can be updated. If there are no related courses to certain skills, the system recommends the creation of a new course that consists of several missing skills pertinent to each other. This publication presents the methodology and the results of QualiChain Curriculum Designer for the software development domain and the curriculum of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) school of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).

From a technical perspective, several text analytics and data mining techniques have been employed. More specifically, web crawlers have been developed to acquire a large number of job posts, text classification and named entity recognition (NER) techniques have been employed for skill annotation in the job posts, text matching to identify missing skills and association rules mining to unravel relations between skills. The analysis and methodology that have been followed along with the results are presented in more detail in the respective sections of this publication.

Keywords:

Curriculum Design, Labour Market, Data Analytics, Data Mining, Association Rule Mining, Text Analytics, Text Matching, Web Crawling.