In-demand Skills Research Articles

Reframing Student Employability: From Commodifying the Self to Supporting Student, Worker, and Societal Well-Being

In ShortThe employability discourse argues that the ability of college graduates to find employment is entirely dependent on their own dedication to acquiring in-demand skills that can be sold in t...

Determinants of Foreign Direct Investment: An Analysis on Policy Variables in the Malaysian Manufacturing Industry

Using the current 2-digit levels of a panel data set during the period of 2000 to 2018, this study adds to the literature by investigating the determinants of policy variables that influence the increase of foreign direct investment (FDI) inward stock in nine manufacturing industries according to the industry classification. Applying the ordinary least square (OLS) estimator with a robust standard error, this study concludes that direct domestic investment from local investors and investment in employers’ training play a very significant role to influence FDI inward stock in the medium-high and low technology industries. The study also found that degree holders working in the electrical and electronics (E&E), chemical, and machinery and equipment industries negatively influence FDI inwards due to their perceived level of absorptive capacity. The result implies that there is a mismatch of supply and demand of labour force and skills in dealing with the rapidly changing labour-market conditions. This study thus suggests that courses offered at tertiary institutions undergo a revision to make them more industry- driven. Human capital investment needs to focus on in-demand skills rather than skills deemed obsolete in the industries. Graduates, therefore, need to be equipped with transferable skills that can be “transferred” across different industries.

Ensuring sustainable growth based on the artificial intelligence analysis and forecast of in-demand skills

Sustainable economic growth requires a system for forecasting the in-demand skills and competencies. The existing methods of analysis and forecasting of the labor market use truncated databases based on surveys of employers or registered vacancies on the state portal, which do provide reliable forecasts of the required competencies for the education system to ensure their timely formation. It is also impossible to analyze the need in terms of competencies, and not the number of employees. Therefore, a more reliable source of data is the analysis of vacancies and resumes collected by scraping from online job portals, which allows you to analyze vacancies and resumes in the context of the described competencies, and develop a forecast of their dynamics. The article presents an algorithm for using artificial intelligence in the analysis and forecasting of skills and competencies in demand, the advantages of which lie not only in the volume and speed of the processed information, but also in ensuring the quality and comparability of data.

Does It Pay Off to Learn a New Skill? Revealing the Economic Benefits of Cross-Skilling

This work examines the economic benefits of learning a new skill from a different domain: cross-skilling. To assess this, a network of skills from the job profiles of 14,790 online freelancers is constructed. Based on this skill network, relationships between 3,480 different skills are revealed and marginal effects of learning a new skill can be calculated via workers’ wages. The results indicate that learning in-demand skills, such as popular programming languages, is beneficial in general, and that diverse skill sets tend to be profitable, too. However, the economic benefit of a new skill is individual, as it complements the existing skill bundle of each worker. As technological and social transformation is reshuffling jobs’ task profiles at a fast pace, the findings of this study help to clarify skill sets required for designing individual re-skilling pathways. This can help to increase employability and reduce labour market shortages.

\u201cLike a nurse but not a nurse\u201d: Clinical Research Practitioners and the evolution of the clinical research delivery workforce in the NHS

BackgroundClinical research is increasing across the United Kingdom. Within the context of a shortage of nurses, trusts have struggled to maintain research capacity. In order to meet staffing demands, trusts have increasingly turned to Clinical Research Practitioners (CRPs) to assist in the delivery of clinical research. Initially an ad hoc workforce, the CRP role is being formalised and professionalised. This study is a close examination of the clinical research delivery workforce at one research-intensive acute trust in the United Kingdom, with a focus on the emerging CRP staff group.MethodsThe study was conducted in a large inner-city teaching hospital (acute trust) in London, United Kingdom. Data were collected between September and December 2017. Twenty-five staff were interviewed across 11 different directorates. Interviews were semi-structured with an overall focus on research staff backgrounds and roles, as well as their perceptions and experiences of careers in research. The data were managed using NVivo 11 software and analysed thematically.ResultsCRPs are drawn from a wider pool of educational and employment backgrounds than their nurse colleagues, and actively seek out work in health research. CRPs receive on-the-job training to acquire the competencies that are necessary for them to carry out their work. The CRP role, which began in an ad hoc manner, has become regularised, yet remains to be well defined, which can be a source of frustration for CRPs and those who work with them.ConclusionsThe professionalisation of the CRP workforce represents an opportunity for the health research system to employ research workers who possess a range of in-demand skills and to shore up research capacity in the context of the shortage of nurses.

Personal branding of artists and art-designers: necessity or desire?

PurposePersonal branding becomes a new in-demand skill for all professionals today. To be well-known helps to achieve success in the networked business environment. Personal relationships and a good reputation in the reality of network economy help young artists and art designers move up the career ladder. This paper aims to discuss a problem of artists who often find it difficult to define their artistic and self-distinction identities. The concept of personal brand and branding seems quite irrelevant, especially in reference to their own selves. People usually associate branding with marketing, which in our minds is usually the same as “pushy” and aggressive sales practices. Their find problematic to promote themselves. The purpose of this paper is to highlight that, based on existing theories, artistic identity creation in connection with the skill of personal branding is crucial for personal success in the profession of today’s young artists and art designers.Design/methodology/approachThe study was conducted based on the data originally collected among artists, designers, architecture professionals and students. The data have been analyzed with the equal structural equation modeling method.FindingsThis paper presents empirical evidence that if artists view themselves as personal brands, it affects their personal performance in a positive way.Practical implicationsAuthors claim that a teaching curriculum for young adult artists should include a personal branding program, to help them find and support their artistic identity and express their personal values and self-brand distinction, and leverage them to build their professional career.Originality/valueThis is one of the first studies to quantify the self-brand performance of young art designers as a benefit of being self-brand oriented.

THE PROBLEMS OF HIGHER AGRARIAN EDUCATION IN THE POST-SOVIET STATES

The job market is changing at a more rapid speed than ever, influenced by developing industries and business models. Today's job markets and in-demand skills will look significantly different. The importance of implanting employability as a serious value and attitude throughout the higher education segment has never been stronger. Graduate employability means that higher education alumni developed the capacity to get work. Moreover, employability means that institutions and employers have supported the student knowledge, skills, qualities, philosophical outlook and individuality that graduates need to be successful in the labor force. In the article, on the basis of the review of scientific and educational literature, a theoretical analysis of the processes of vocational guidance and employment of graduates of agricultural universities in the Russian Federation was carried out. In particular, the problem of the discrepancy between theoretical knowledge and practical skills was noted, one of the main problems of agriculture - the lack of qualified specialists was identified, the main directions of agro-professional orientation processes were revealed on the basis of the synergetic approach, considerable attention was focused on the employment of graduates and cooperation of employers with higher educational institutions both on issues of employment, and traineeships. Successful implementation of the agrarian universities of its public mission was and is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for satisfying the personnel needs of the agribusiness. The optimality of the proportions of providing specific organizations and regions with skilled personnel, motivation of work, professional development of workers, their career growth and much more determines the efficiency of the use of human resources.In the modern world, the ability to retrain and mobility has already been recognized as the most important qualities of professionals of any age, and this circumstance should be taken into account when developing the criteria for the employment of graduates.

Examining graduate skills in accounting and finance

While many universities have implemented various initiatives and teaching and learning methods to embed the most in-demand skills into their degree programmes, there is little evidence in the literature of students’ opinions and awareness of these skills. The purpose of this article is to assess, through an empirical study, students’ perceptions of the skills commonly identified in the literature as important for the field of accounting and finance. A total of 462 surveys were collected and analysed using the SAS statistical analysis tool. According to the findings, the most important graduate skills are communication skills, followed by analytical skills and self-management. The findings also reveal that the language of instruction is statistically significant for a few graduate skills, including interpersonal, planning and organization, communication, self-management and analytical skills. Age is statistically significant for critical thinking skills and gender is statistically significant for leadership, technological and communication skills.

The Private Sector Role in Offensive Cyber Operations: Benefits, Issues and Challenges

This paper explores the role that companies play in supporting offensive cyber operations. It finds that contractors play critical roles in two key functions: intelligence/reconnaissance and planning/mission support. The reliance of the U.S. military on cyber contractors brings both benefits and risks. Benefits include access to rapidly evolving technologies and the ability to obtain access to in-demand skills sets quickly and easily. Challenges fall into two categories: domestic policy and international relations. In the former case, the main issues are over-reliance on non-government personnel and challenges in oversight of cyber contractors, which could result in undesirable financial and strategic outcomes. Within the international arena, cyber contractors may affect the balance of power of states. The most likely outcome is that the use of contractors will exacerbate existing power discrepancies between developed and developing countries. However, it is possible that wealthy but less developed states could rely on private sector capability to quickly develop their cyber attack capabilities. Another issue that may affect international relations is uncertainty about the legal status of cyber contractors as combatants. A final concern surrounds the observation that companies may find themselves on both sides of a cyber operation. To accrue the benefits and address the challenges posed by contractor support to offensive cyber operations, several actions should be taken. There needs to be a public debate about the proper role of cyber contractors in military operations. Companies should have a voice in this debate due to their increasingly important role in cyberspace. In addition, the US government and international community must provide guidance to cyber contractors on the role that they should play in offensive cyber operations. Export controls are helpful but they are blunt tools that often bring heavy costs and do not always accomplish their desired outcomes. More precise direction is needed, most likely beginning with norms of behavior.

SKILL: A System for Skill Identification and Normalization

Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Named Entity Normalization (NEN) refer to the recognition and normalization of raw texts to known entities. From the perspective of recruitment innovation, professional skill characterization and normalization render human capital data more meaningful both commercially and socially. Accurate and detailed normalization of skills is the key for the predictive analysis of labor market dynamics. Such analytics help bridge the skills gap between employers and candidate workers by matching the right talent for the right job and identifying in-demand skills for workforce training programs. This can also work towards the social goal of providing more job opportunities to the community. In this paper we propose an automated approach for skill entity recognition and optimal normalization. The proposed system has two components: 1) Skills taxonomy generation, which employs vocational skill related sections of resumes and Wikipedia categories to define and develop a taxonomy of professional skills; 2) Skills tagging, which leverages properties of semantic word vectors to recognize and normalize relevant skills in input text. By sampling based end-user evaluation, the current system attains 91% accuracy on the taxonomy generation and 82% accuracy on the skills tagging tasks. The beta version of the system is currently applied in various big data and business intelligence applications for workforce analytics and career track projections at CareerBuilder.

A regional focus for solving the skills-jobs mismatch.

The United States and other nations around the world are not producing enough workers with the skills needed for employment is today's high-tech global economy. Many STEM occupations are now vital to a broad range of industries and professions, thus placing different economic sectors in competition for people with in-demand skill sets. The media's continuing fixation on the Federal Reserve's monetary medicine for unemployment obscures the growing uncomfortable reality that monetary/fiscal policy alone cannot fix the structural failures of the ossified U.S. education-to-employment system. Washington leaders inside the beltway and people across America are just starting to understand this new reality as the skilled workforce crisis deepens.

These ACS Short Courses Will Provide You with Vital, In-Demand Skills and Practical Knowledge

These ACS Short Courses Will Provide You with Vital, In-Demand Skills and Practical Knowledge

These ACS Short Courses Will Provide You With Vital, In-Demand Skills and Practical Knowledge

These ACS Short Courses Will Provide You With Vital, In-Demand Skills and Practical Knowledge