Content analysis of OR job advertisements to infer required skills

The paper presents an empirical method to infer employers' requirements of operational research (OR) skills by analysing the text of online job ads using content analysis. The method entailed collecting more than a thousand job ads from online sources, creating a hierarchy of sets of OR-related words and phrases, and then analysing the job ads using content analysis software to count the numbers of ads using the hierarchy of words and phrases. The method is particularly well suited for the periodic analysis of job ads to understand changes and trends, and is replicable in that, when carried out using our proposed keywords, it would yield the same results for any set of OR job ads.