Abstract:

The problem of elaboration of curricula management tools for higher education institutions is of great importance. One of the main goals to solve that problem is to create the unified ontology of competencies for universities, employers and professional standards elaborators. Unfortunately, educational and professional competencies are very different so their comparing is a hard task. In particular, the gap can be detected between curricula content and professional requirements of employers, especially in such intensively developing areas as Information Technology (IT). Thus, the analysis of competencies requirements in job advertisements of IT-employers could be useful to understand the real system of professional IT-competencies and to compare that system with curricula competencies.

The paper describes the method and the results of pilot analysis of job advertisements. The goals of that analysis are to identify features for multidimensional classification of job advertisement texts, to provide statistical analysis of required competencies, to compare the requirements of different IT occupations and employers.

To conduct the research a random sample of job advertisements in English for the 10 most popular IT occupations has been collected. In the set of advertisements several hundreds of unique textual descriptions of competency requirements were found. The paper suggests an algorithm of partition the competency descriptions in three parts reflecting the different dimensions for classification – the type of competency (certificate, knowledge, experience, etc.), the level of mastering, and the subject of competency. Partition algorithm showed high accuracy with training and control samples comparison. Thus, each job advertisement is able to be represented as a point in feature space. That representation can be seen as an information model of IT competency from the employers’ point of view.

The paper demonstrates the results of statistical analysis of competency models reflecting the peculiarities of different occupations and employers. These results open up the possibility to construct the ontology of required professional IT-competencies, to compare employers' competencies with competencies of curricula, and to bring the content of curricula into accordance with labor market requirements.

Keywords:

Curricula management, job advertisements, competencies, skills, employers, information technology, text mining, multidimensional classification.