Uncovering the Necessary Hard- and Soft-Skills to Get IT Personnel Jobs: A Text Mining Approach

Abstract

With digitalization disrupting organizations every day, the necessary skills to get a job in modern societies are changing rapidly. Individuals and educational institutions seek knowledge of what industry demands in terms of hard- and soft-skills to plan their next step in having these skills in their personal or educational portfolio. To find out which hard- and soft-skills play a key role in finding IT personnel jobs, we employ a text mining approach on job advertisement data and generate a framework for IT personnel jobs. After doing some standard preprocessing steps, we use topic modeling to generate our results and map those with the IT personnel framework. Our results show that three competencies' fields are relevant for IT personnel jobs, and hard-and soft-skills play both a major role in those. Depending on which competencies field one wants to explore, we highlighted the most necessary skills that may play a decisive role when applying for a job in that position. Our findings contribute to the stream of literature equipping both educational institutions and individuals with recommendations of the skills to include and focus on regarding IT personnel.