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Building a soft skill taxonomy from job openings

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Abstract

Soft skills are crucial for candidates in the job market, and analyzing these skills listed in job ads can help in identifying the most important soft skills required by recruiters. This analysis can benefit from building a taxonomy to extract soft skills. However, most prior work is primarily focused on building hard skill taxonomies. Unfortunately, methodologies for building hard skill taxonomies do not work well for soft skills, due to the wide variety of terminologies used to list soft skills in job ads. Moreover, prior work has mainly focused on extracting soft skills from job ads using a simple keyword search, which can fail to detect the different forms in which soft skills are listed in job ads. In this paper, we develop TaxoSoft, a methodology for building a soft skill taxonomy that uses DBpedia and Word2Vec in order to find terms related to different soft skills. TaxoSoft also uses social network analysis to build a hierarchy of terms. We use this method to build soft skill taxonomies in both English and French. We evaluate TaxoSoft on a sample of job ads and find that it achieves an F-score of 0.84, while taxonomies developed in prior work achieve an F-score of only 0.54. We then use the proposed methodology to analyze soft skills listed in job ads in order to find the skills most required in the American and Moroccan job markets. Our findings can offer insights to universities about the top soft skills requested in the job market.

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Notes

  1. https://ec.europa.eu/esco.

  2. https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/job-skills.

  3. https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/job-skills.

  4. http://dbpedia.org/sparql.

  5. http://fr.dbpedia.org/sparql.

  6. https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/models/word2vec.html.

  7. https://www.kaggle.com/c/job-salary-prediction/data.

  8. https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/job-skills.

  9. https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/job-skills/methodology.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under grant AID-OAAA-11-00012 and by a Google Africa PhD fellowship. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied of USAID or Google. The authors would like to thank Mehdi Zakroum and Ibtissam Makdoun for useful comments and discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universite Internationale de Rabat, TicLab, Rabat, Morocco

    Imane Khaouja & Ghita Mezzour

  2. Universite Mohammed V de Rabat, Rabat, Morocco

    Imane Khaouja & Ismail Kassou

  3. Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Kathleen M. Carley

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  1. Imane Khaouja
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  2. Ghita Mezzour
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Correspondence to Imane Khaouja.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 13, 14 and 15.

Table 13 Soft skill taxonomy in English
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Table 14 Soft skill taxonomy in French
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Table 15 List of soft skills
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Khaouja, I., Mezzour, G., Carley, K.M. et al. Building a soft skill taxonomy from job openings. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 9, 43 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-019-0583-9

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