PostAc : A Visual Interactive Search, Exploration, and Analysis Platform for PhD Intensive Job Postings

Chenchen Xu, Inger Mewburn, Will J Grant, Hanna Suominen


Abstract
Over 60% of Australian PhD graduates land their first job after graduation outside academia, but this job market remains largely hidden to these job seekers. Employers’ low awareness and interest in attracting PhD graduates means that the term “PhD” is rarely used as a keyword in job advertisements; 80% of companies looking to employ similar researchers do not specifically ask for a PhD qualification. As a result, typing in “PhD” to a job search engine tends to return mostly academic jobs. We set out to make the market for advanced research skills more visible to job seekers. In this paper, we present PostAc, an online platform of authentic job postings that helps PhD graduates sharpen their career thinking. The platform is underpinned by research on the key factors that identify what an employer is looking for when they want to hire a highly skilled researcher. Its ranking model leverages the free-form text embedded in the job description to quantify the most sought-after PhD skills and educate information seekers about the Australian job-market appetite for PhD skills. The platform makes visible the geographic location, industry sector, job title, working hours, continuity, and wage of the research intensive jobs. This is the first data-driven exploration in this field. Both empirical results and online platform will be presented in this paper.
Anthology ID:
P19-3008
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Marta R. Costa-jussà, Enrique Alfonseca
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
43–48
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-3008
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-3008
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chenchen Xu, Inger Mewburn, Will J Grant, and Hanna Suominen. 2019. PostAc : A Visual Interactive Search, Exploration, and Analysis Platform for PhD Intensive Job Postings. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 43–48, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PostAc : A Visual Interactive Search, Exploration, and Analysis Platform for PhD Intensive Job Postings (Xu et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-3008.pdf