Jeisson Arley Cárdenas Rubio - A Web-Based Approach to Measure Skill Mismatches and Skills Profiles for a Developing Country:

ESS Employer Skills Survey

EU European Union

FILCO Fuente de Información Laboral de Colombia

GDP Gross Domestic Product

GEIH Gran Encuesta Integrada de Hogares

HSEQ Health, Safety, Environment & Quality

HTML Hypertext Markup Language

IALS International Adult Literacy Survey

ICT Information and Communications Technology

IDB Interamerican Bank of Development

IER Warwick Institute for Employment Research

ILO International Labour Organization

IP Internet Protocol

ISCO International Standard Classification of Occupations

ISIC International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities

ISO International Organization for Standardization

IT Information Technology

LASSO Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator

LEFM Local Economy Forecasting Model

LFS Labour Force Survey

LTDA Limitada

MAC Migration Advisory Committee

MEN Ministerio de Educación Nacional de Colombia

N&E New and Emerging (Occupations)

NIF Normas de Información Financiera

NIIF Normas Internacionales de Información Financiera

NOS National Occupational Standards

NQF National Qualifications Framework

OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

OEI Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos

OLS Ordinary Least Squares

O*NET Occupational Information Network

ONS Office for National Statistics

OSP Occupational Skills Profiles

OVATE Skills Online Vacancy Analysis Tool

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor

PIAAC Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies

PISA Programme for International Student Assessment

RSPO Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

RUES Registro único empresarial

SENA Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje

SEO Search Engine Optimization

SIC Standard Industrial Classification

SMEs Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

SMMLV Salario mínimo mensual legal vigente

SNIES Sistema Nacional de Información de Educación Superior

SNPP Sub-National Population Projections

SOC Standard Occupational Classification

SQA Software Quality Assurance/Advisor

SQL Structured Query Language

SST System Support Team

SSTA Gestión en seguridad, salud en el trabajo y ambiente

STEP Skills Measurement Program

SVM Support Vector Machine

TAT Store-to-store (for its acronym in Spanish)

TVET Technical and Vocational Education and Training

UAESPE Unidad Administrativa Especial del Servicio Público de Empleo

UK United Kingdom

UKCES UK Commission for Employment and Skills

US United States

VET Vocational Education and Training

XML Extensible Markup Language

1. Introduction

This book studies how, and to what extent, a web-based system to monitor skills and skill mismatches could be developed for Colombia based on information from job portals. More specifically, this document seeks to answer the following questions: 1) How can information from job portals be used to inform policy recommendations? And, in order to address two of the major labour market problems in Colombia, which are high unemployment and informality rates, 2) to what extent can information from job portals (unsatisfied demand) and national household surveys (labour supply) be used together to provide insights about skill mismatch issues in a developing economy?

Consequently, this book investigates the challenges, advantages, and limitations of collecting information from job portals and proposes a framework to test this information’s validity for economic analysis. It conducts an innovative labour market analysis and develops indicators based on updated and robust labour demand (job portal) and labour supply (household survey) information to tackle skill mismatches, extending thus the use of novel sources of information to yet unexplored areas in the existing labour economics literature.

By doing so, this study makes conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions to the ongoing debate in economics about the use of information from job portals for labour demand analysis. The main conceptual contribution consists of demonstrating that the concept and sources of Big Data (in this case, job portal sources) can provide consistent results to orient public policies (see Chapters 7to 9). This document also demonstrates that, with the proper techniques, information from job portals can fulfil conceptual requirements to be considered as high-quality data for labour market analysis (see Chapters 4and 10).

The main methodological contribution is the development of a detailed framework and methods to collect, clean, and organise (i.e. web scraping, occupation and skill identification, etc.) vacancy data, which allows testing and analysing this source of information for consistent labour market insights. Specifically, this book contributes to the methodology of processing information from job portals for public policy advise by: 1) discussing different criteria (volume, website quality, and traffic ranking) to select the most relevant and trustworthy job portals in order to collect vacancy information ( Chapter 5); 2) providing a detailed explanation about Big Data techniques (web scraping) and the challenges they pose for automatically collecting job advertisements from job portals ( Chapter 5); 3) applying mixed-methods approaches (text mining, word-based matching methods, etc.) to standardise information collected from different job portals into a single database for statistical analysis ( Chapter 6); 4) implementing and extending a mixed-methods approach (stop words, stemming, extensions of a machine learning algorithm, etc.) in order to identify skills and occupations in online job announcements ( Chapter 6); 5) and, importantly, using this extended mixed-methods approach (e.g. a skills dictionary to identify skill patterns) to find new or specific skills and occupations in the Colombian labour market, which would otherwise be complex to identify via other means (e.g. household surveys) ( Chapter 6).

Moreover, the book proposes a (n-gram-based) method to reduce duplication issues (as information is collected from different job portals, some job advertisements can be repeated) and a (Lasso) method to impute missing values, such as education and wages ( Chapter 6). Consequently, by implementing and extending novel mixed methods, 6) this document improves data collection and helps to understand methodological changes to collect and organise information from job portals.

As a product of the above methods, a vacancy database was consolidated for the period between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2018 ( Chapter 7). In addition, this document makes further methodological contributions by 7) proposing a framework to evaluate the internal (consistency) and external (representativeness) validity of this vacancy database. To test internal validity, a statistical comparison was conducted between variables, such as wages, occupations, education, etc., to understand biases, errors, and inconsistencies within the database. The evaluation of external validity was particularly challenging because countries like Colombia do not have vacancy censuses (or anything similar) to compare information collected from job portals. Despite several obstacles, this book provides and applies a methodology framework to evaluate the vacancy database. It implements a detailed comparison between official information available in the country (i.e. household surveys) and vacancy data results, such as vacancy, employment, new hires, unemployment, occupational structures and their dynamics over the study period. This comparison enables the understanding of possible biases (e.g. over/underrepresentation of certain occupational groups) in the vacancy database ( Chapter 8).