A comparative study of IT/IS job skills and job definitions

Do large firms have a pattern of utilizing certain types of IT/IS skills more than others? Do individuals need to have one set of IT/IS skills for Fortune 500 companies and another set of skills for small-sized firms? Understanding the set of skills required for IT/IS jobs is of importance to professionals as it governs their employability as well as their decisions to seek professional certifications. Meanwhile, the trend of job outsourcing means that certain types of jobs are kept in-house in firms while other types are contracted out. It thus becomes paramount for professionals to know the skill set that is required to preserve their employability in the job market. This ongoing study evaluates the skills required for IT/IS jobs by analyzing a broad set of online job descriptions. An initial set of data has been gathered through an automated retrieval of jobs descriptions from online sites. This data set will be analyzed using Latent Semantic Clustering which will result in a quantitative classification system of IT/IS jobs. The comparison of job skill requirements between small and large-sized firms is another expected result of this study. The contribution of this study is expected to be the determination of patterns of skills required for IT/IS jobs, a non-judgmental and quantitatively based definition of IT/IS jobs, and the investigation of differences in hiring patterns between firms of varying sizes.