Chapter Big data analysis and labour market: an analysis of Italian online job vacancies data

Abstract

Economists and social scientists are increasingly making use of web data to address socio-economic issues and to integrate existing sources of information. The data produced by online platforms and websites could produce a lot of useful and multidimensional information with a variety of potential applications in socio-economic analysis. In this respect, with the internet growth and knowledge, many aspects of job search have been transformed due to the availability of online tools for job searching, candidate searching and job matching. In European countries there is growing interest in designing and implementing real labour market information system applications for internet labour market data in order to support policy design and evaluation through evidence-based decision-making. The analysis of labour market web data could provide useful information for policy-makers to define labour market strategies as big data, jointly with official statistics, support policy makers in a pressing policy question namely “How to tackle the mismatch between jobs and skills?”. In this regard, the topic of skills gap, how to measure it and how to bridge it with education and continuous training have been tackled by using the big data collection, such as the Cedefop (European Center for the Development of Vocational Training) initiative and the Wollybi Project (made by Burning Glass). In this framework, this contribution focuses on the issues arising from the use (and the usefulness) of on-line job vacancy data to analyse the Italian labour market by using the Wollybi data available for the years 2019 and 2020. Furthermore, the availability of data for the year 2020, will allow us to evaluate whether there has been an impact of COVID19 in terms of needed skills and required occupations in the online job vacancies.