The paper presents an empirical method to infer employers' requirements ofoperational research (OR) skills by analysing the text of online job ads usingcontent analysis. The method entailed collecting more than a thousand job adsfrom online sources, creating a hierarchy of sets of OR-related words andphrases, and then analysing the job ads using content analysis software to countthe numbers of ads using the hierarchy of words and phrases. The method isparticularly well suited for the periodic analysis of job ads to understandchanges and trends, and is replicable in that, when carried out using ourproposed keywords, it would yield the same results for any set of OR jobads.