WHICH SKILLS ARE DEMANDED AT THE “HUMAN RESOURCES” MARKETPLACE? – EXPLICITLY HEADED SKILLS STATED IN JOB ADVERTISEMENTS FOR FINANCE AND ACCOUNTING GRADUATES

The role and importance of skills at the job market has an undoubtedly effect on graduates of a university or business school. Curricular decisions may also be based on the demand for skills. Job announcements are documents which contain information about this demand. Hence information stated in job ads seem to have importance for the job market which can for example be described with Clyde (2002): “Statements in job advertisements represent the knowledge and skills that employers would like to have and are prepared to pay for“.

The aim of the following article is to identify, analyze and investigate skill related attributes for the area of finance and accounting, which are explicitly headed in a sample of 1200 job advertisements with content analysis and text mining methods. A better understanding of frequencies, combinations and clusters of skills, which are stated in job ads, shall be given. These findings can be used for curricular decisions in a global and local higher education marketplace. The paper shows the most important skills in the field of finance and accounting, identifies four different clusters (a technical skill cluster; an international skill cluster; a IT skill cluster and a general skill cluster) and shows their skill compositions of the different clusters which can be used for curriculum planning.