Abstract

The primary objective of college education in applied disciplines is that it is relevant to the expectations for new professionals entering the labor market. Academic institutions should therefore pay close attention to the ever-changing skills and knowledge expectations in the labor market. These trends are not easy to track, however. Surveys of new professionals about their experiences in their first jobs or surveys of employers about their experiences with new hires suffer from low response rates, nonresponse bias, and the one-time nature of survey research. A better way to track labor market trends is to continually analyze human factors job postings for education and experience requirements specified in them. This report describes development of a database for that purpose. We also discuss ways of analyzing unstructured text data in the database. The results of analyses of these data include summary statistics of frequencies and their correlations, clusters of similar jobs, and a continually updated mathematical model to classify jobs in the database. These results may be subjected to longitudinal analyses when the database contains sufficient data. If desired by other departments, this style of database and functionality could be repurposed for other domains or fields of employment. Anyone interested in applying this database for domains other than HF/E should contact Production Services at the Wallace Center at RIT.

Publication Date

8-15-2013

Document Type

Technical Report

Department, Program, or Center

Psychology, Department of

College

College of Liberal Arts

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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