Designating Skilled Technical Workforce Using Online Job Postings

The Skilled Technical Workforce (STW) are individuals without a bachelor’s degree but have a non-degree credential that provides them with STEM skills. In 2015, Rothwell proposed a strategy for classifying occupations as STW using education and knowledge survey data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) Content Model. However, these data present a number of fitness-for-use issues such as small sample sizes, data for some occupations over a decade old, data are not available for all occupations, and the sampling error is ignored when constructing the estimate. The STW is a function of the nature of work which is rapidly changing due to emerging technologies, it follows the data used to classify this segment of the workforce be current. We propose a new approach for classifying STW occupations using labor market information such as online job postings. These data provide detailed information at the occupation level on the skills required and the technical nature of the skills. We use skills demand as a proxy for knowledge and classify occupations as STW according to the level of technical skills required. Our new classification approach shows that many additional occupations should be included in the STW

SIWE G. Montalvo C, Lancaster V. Designating Skilled Technical Workforce Using Online Job Postings. (2024). University of Virginia. https://doi.org/10.18130/pp1g-a507