The growing use of online job vacancies creates new opportunities to monitor the situation in the labour market.

Cedefop began to develop a pan-European system to gather and analyze the data of online job vacancies (OJVs) from the perspective of the skills demand in Europe already in 2015. In 2018, the methodology of the system was endorsed, and data collection began. Currently, preliminary analyses and data are available on 7 countries: Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Information from other Member States will be added systematically. The tool provides information about occupations, skills and regions, based on international classifications: ISCO-08 for occupations, NUTS-2 for regions and ESCO for skills. The completed system for all EU Member States, including ready-made functionalities, will be available by the end of 2020.

System proposed by Cedefop can be treated as supplementary to the standard tools usually used to analyze the labour market because analysing only online job vacancies has some limitations: for some sectors, online offers are over-represented or one advertisement can be placed on several portals at the same time. The offers are also prepared for search engines, contain only keywords or only list desirable skills that do not reflect all aspects of the vacancy. Furthermore, countries vary in the scope of the use of OJV portals due to the different employment structures or digitalization levels.

During work on the tool, a report was prepared on the market of online job vacancies in the EU. It points out that this market is very diversified. The biggest differences between countries relate to the state of the labour market and the role of public employment services in the online job market as well as the size of the country itself.

References:

• Cedefop (2019). The online job vacancy market in the EU: driving forces and emerging trends. Luxembourg: Publications Office. Cedefop research paper; No 72. http://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2801/16675
• Cedefop (2019). Online job vacancies and skills analysis: a Cedefop pan-European approach. Luxembourg: Publications Office. http://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2801/097022

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

More information on the Skills Online Vacancy Analysis Tool is available at the Cedefop website.

http://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/data-visualisations/skills-online-vacancies