Employment and Social Development Canada examines skill based occupational similarity to help inform about job mobility in the Canadian labour market.
Contributor
Thomas Hindle
Research Advisor
ESDC
Transcript
Hi, I'm Thomas Hindle, researcher on the Labour Market and Skills Research Division at ESDC, here to talk about our work on skill based occupational similarity.
The goal of this project is to gain estimates of similarity between occupations to help inform about job mobility in the Canadian labour market. We look at the underlying skills, knowledge, experience of occupations in Canada and from this calculate estimates of similarity between two jobs.
This can be used to help identify occupations that have few opportunities to easily transition, finding the underlying skill gaps that limit people from being able to switch jobs, and to help inform policies to assess those that are in the most need of retraining.
One issue with the project as business has been working with so much data. We use web scraped job postings data, used on a very large occupational database, and we link this to pre-existing Canadian forecasts and wage data for each occupation in Canada. This has been challenging but has also made the project very interesting and very fun. We are hoping that the information gathered will help inform Canadians for years to come.
Thank you. Have a good day.
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