LiveCareer partnered with research firm TIRO Communications to understand whether job seekers are likely to meet employer expectations in 2021. Analyzing more than 7,000 resumes and 3,500 job ads across 70 different job titles and 18 occupations, the research employed natural language processing to identify the hard, soft, remote-work and management skills appearing with regularity.
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Rates of occurrence (i.e., how many times a skill appeared in a specified group of job ads or resumes) and frequency (i.e., what percentage of job ads or resumes in a specified data set include the skill) were measured.
In addition to analyzing individual skills, soft skills were broken into five main categories to give LiveCareer a high-level assessment of skill frequency and occurrence: (1) personal traits, (2) leadership skills, (3) communications skills, (4) interpersonal skills and (5) analytical skills.
In the case of remote skills, terms related to working from home, such as home office, virtual, remote and so forth, were ranked. Remote-enabling technologies such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other communications and project management tools were assessed for their occurrence and frequency, as were the aforementioned terms.
The analysis compared 2019 and 2020 resumes for the time frame of June through October to determine if job seekers began emphasizing different skill sets after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Job ads and resumes for June through October 2020 were also compared to pinpoint skills gaps between employers and job seekers — namely, skills employers place greater emphasis on than job seekers and vice versa. Beyond analyzing hard, soft, remote, and management skills across 70 job titles, the aggregate, as well as blue- and white-collar sectors, was examined.
