ARCHIVAL HUMAN FACTORS JOBS DATABASE AS A TOOL FOR TRACKING TRENDS IN SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE EXPECTATIONS IN THE LABOR MARKET

摘要

To educate the future human factors/ergonomics workforce and meet the demand for new professionals inthe field, academic institutions must pay close attention to the ever-changing skills and knowledge expectationsin the labor market. These trends are not easy to track, however. Surveys of new professionals abouttheir experiences in their first jobs or surveys of employers about their experiences with new hires sufferfrom low response rates, nonresponse bias, and the one-time nature of survey research. A better way totrack labor market trends is to continually analyze human factors job postings for education and experiencerequirements specified in them. This paper describes development of a database for that purpose. We alsodiscuss ways of analyzing unstructured text data in the database. The results of analyses of these data includesummary statistics of frequencies and their correlations, clusters of similar jobs, and a continuallyupdated mathematical model to classify jobs in the database. These results will be subjected to longitudinalanalyses when the database contains sufficient data.