Bridging the Skills Gap: How Real-Time Job Vacancy Data Can Reshape Employment Strategies in Argentina and Uruguay

Read the Report

In a world grappling with rapidly evolving job markets, have you ever wondered if we could predict the skills that employers will need? A new World Bank report analyzed online job posting data to gain near real-time insight into the demand for jobs and skills in Argentina and Uruguay. The report shows that a more immediate and precise understanding of what employers are looking for is possible so that their demands can be met and, at the same time, so that workers can develop the appropriate skills.

The analysis provides a near real-time "thermometer" of the economy with the potential to anticipate employment and unemployment trends. This could allow policymakers to act more quickly than with classic data sources such as surveys and administrative records.

The report identifies the following trends:

• More than half of the vacancies in Argentina and Uruguay require technical, socio-emotional, and cognitive skills. Digital skills are also highly sought after. Manual skills are less frequently requested.

• In Argentina and Uruguay, intermediate digital skills are the most requested; linguistic skills are highly demanded among cognitive ones, and organizational and communication skills among socio-emotional ones.

• Within technical competencies, there is greater demand for areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), followed by management competencies.

• Complementarity between skills is also observed. For example, cognitive skills frequently appear in job advertisements alongside digital and socio-emotional skills, which suggests that companies seek combinations of these competencies.

A map of in-demand jobs

To understand the similarity between jobs that are more and less in demand, the authors created a map of occupational similarity

Understanding Labor Market Demand in Real Time

The map shows that workers in low-demand occupations have options to transition to medium- and high-demand occupations that have similar skill sets. This is good news for the design of reskilling and upskilling programs: low-demand jobs frequently share skills with medium- and high-demand jobs meaning that policymakers can focus on the provision of certain missing skills to facilitate job transitions.

By providing detailed information on skill demand and connections between occupations, this data can better guide job seekers, training institutions, and policymakers to respond and adapt to labor market needs. 

As a first step in operationalizing this data, the World Bank is working with the government of Argentina to test a tool that recommends training courses according to job seekers' skills, while also considering the demand for these skills based on the job posting data.