Patterns of co-occurrent skills in UK job adverts

TL;DR

This study constructs a large-scale skills network from UK job adverts, revealing modular skill clusters, their demand patterns, geographic variations, and how employer demands have broadened over time, offering insights into evolving skill requirements.

Contribution

The paper introduces a data-driven approach to identify and analyze skill clusters from a vast dataset, uncovering their structure, demand, and geographic distribution, which differ from traditional expert categorizations.

Findings

Skill clusters exhibit diverse roles and demand levels.

Geographic variation aligns with regional industrial profiles.

Employers demand a broader and more interconnected skill set over time.

Abstract

A job usually involves the application of several complementary or synergistic skills to perform its required tasks. Such relationships are implicitly recognised by employers in the skills they demand when recruiting new employees. Here we construct a skills network based on their co-occurrence in a national level data set of 65 million job postings from the UK spanning 2016 to 2022. We then apply multiscale graph-based community detection to obtain data-driven skill clusters at different levels of resolution that reveal a modular structure across scales. Skill clusters display diverse levels of demand and occupy varying roles within the skills network: some have broad reach across the network (high closeness centrality) while others have higher levels of within-cluster containment, yet with high interconnection across clusters and no skill silos. The skill clusters also display varying levels of semantic similarity, highlighting the difference between co-occurrence in adverts and intrinsic thematic consistency. Clear geographic variation is evident in the demand for each skill cluster across the UK, broadly reflecting the industrial characteristics of each region, e.g., London appears as an outlier as an international hub for finance, education and business. Comparison of data from 2016 and 2022 reveals employers are demanding a broader range of skills over time, with more adverts featuring skills spanning different clusters. We also show that our data-driven clusters differ from expert-authored categorisations of skills, indicating that important relationships between skills are not captured by expert assessment alone.