Skills in the management oriented IS and enterprise system job markets

Abstract

With turmoil in the U.S. and world economies, it is more necessary than ever to ensure that graduates and employees have the skills necessary to compete in the job market. Some of the previous research on job skills has looked at job advertisements in print and online media to determine skills that employers were seeking; other research interviewed or surveyed employers to determine employers' needs. Results were often conflicting as previously summarized in Litecky, Zwieg and Huang. Now web content data mining techniques allow for much greater sampling and specific analysis of current MIS (simply defined as Management oriented Information Systems types of skills) oriented job ads. In this approach over two million advertisements were filtered to over one half million U.S. job advertisements for MIS degree graduates from various job websites. Management-oriented IS skills were compiled in a thesaurus and then those skills were extracted from the selected job ads. These skills were compared to the job advertisements for subsequent analysis. Results suggest much more concordance between disparate job advertisements and survey-based research. These results reinforce much of the desired uniqueness of MIS curricula as compared to other computing degree curricula. Results herein are limited to U.S. and are also contrasted with the similar content and analysis of job skills in the Australian IS job market. In addition an analysis is performed on the cross disciplinary data on Enterprise System/SAP jobs which were not limited to MIS graduates.