Technologies, trends and theories:
knowledge at the cutting edge.

Our knowledge base contains information, interesting facts and selected articles on the latest trends and current developments on global labor markets and in the world of semantic technologies relating to human resources and recruitment, occupation (big) data and ontologies / knowledge graphs, job classifications, CV parsing, skills and job matching and much more.

Old News, Current Problem: Over-Qualified Graduates in the UK

The lack of graduate jobs in the UK and the subsequent un- and underemployment of university leavers have been decried for years. New research now reports that over-qualification has reached saturation point, with woeful impacts on the UK economy.

According to a report commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), more than half the UK’s graduates are wasting their degrees in jobs that do not require a university qualification and are thereby driving lower skilled workers out of their jobs.  » Read more about: Old News, Current Problem: Over-Qualified Graduates in the UK  »

Survival of the Fittest: Badly Educated Men Struggling to Keep Up

Badly educated men in rich countries are a species hit hard by the changing demands of the labor market. They have enjoyed unwarranted advantages in the labor market simply because of their sex for decades and centuries but now their fortune is changing.
The Economist emphasized in an article how men cluster both at the top and the bottom of US society. While 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 98% of Forbes’ self-made billionaires are male and 93% of world’s government heads are male,  » Read more about: Survival of the Fittest: Badly Educated Men Struggling to Keep Up  »

A Look into the Crystal Ball: Future Work Skills

The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has recently published a study about the most important work skills for the future. Yet, those who expect to find a guideline will be disappointed.
Due to the rapidly changing demands of the labor market, the study has found that foresight and adaptability will be the key to success. The top ten skills for 2020 listed by the IFTF therefore contain abilities like “sense-making”, “transdisciplinarity” or “novel and adaptive thinking” (see graphic below).  » Read more about: A Look into the Crystal Ball: Future Work Skills  »

McKinsey Estimates the Potential of Online Job Platforms at $2.7 Trillion

With global unemployment on the rise, finding an effective solution to connect workers with the right jobs and projects has become a pressing issue. The new McKinsey Global Institute report (archived link) finds that online job or talent platforms offer an immense potential to fight unemployment and increase the productivity of the labor market, as they are set to meet the demands of the ever more complex and international job market today.
Presently, 30 to 50 percent of the working-age population is unemployed or only occupied in part-time positions.  » Read more about: McKinsey Estimates the Potential of Online Job Platforms at $2.7 Trillion  »

Software Set to Break with Bias in Job Applications

With gender diversity becoming an ever more important feature of tech companies, some employers are at a loss how to attract more women. As the graphic from Gigaom shows, tech companies struggle to attain an equal number of male and female employees, especially in leadership or technical roles. While the Mad Men days of overt discrimination against women might be over, unconscious bias is still affecting employers and job seekers, resulting in dismal diversity numbers.  » Read more about: Software Set to Break with Bias in Job Applications  »