Using Web Site Scraping To Match United States Virgin Island Employers’ Job Skill Requirements With Marketing Curriculum and Course Development at the University of the Virgin Islands

Abstract

At the same time that the United States Virgin Islands (USVI) government is seeking to stymie the flight of highly skilled personnel (“brain drain”) from the islands, marketing major graduates from the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) are seeking on island employment. Therefore, the need existed to identify what USVI employers are looking for in marketing employees to ensure the UVI marketing curricula is adequately preparing marketing majors for future employment by UVI employers. Research was conducted in two phases: Phase I involved scraping of a government website (USVI Department of Labor’s ViEWS) and analysis of posted marketing-related job descriptions; Phase II was a student research project in a Marketing Research course, Fall semester, 2020 at UVI, that surveyed business owners located on the islands. Results indicate that similar to other academic employability research sources, USVI employers seek graduates with soft skills (generic, vs. technical) such as communication skills (oral and written), IT/computer skills, problem-solving, analytical skills, and ability to work in teams.