Skill Radar
This project involves the development of a technology platform for identifying emerging shifts and trends in the labour market, driven by transformations in technology and demographics.
Such a platform would utilize data from a variety of global and local sources and ingest them in an automated fashion. This information would then be processed using the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence that would allow policy makers, trade associations and companies to identify ‘weak signals’ and prepare mitigation strategies.
The idea would be to develop a Skill Radar that focuses on the needs of Fribourg, aligned with the economic sectors that drive employment in the canton. A key challenge is to map the various skills and competency frameworks used by various public and private actors in order to harmonize them with the ontology and taxonomy used currently in Switzerland by the Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training, the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, etc.
A few notable efforts in the space are being carried out by data rich companies such as LinkedIn in collaboration with inter-governmental organizations such as the ILO, OECD, EU etc. In the Swiss context, several Swiss job portals such as jobup, ictjobs, jobscout24 etc contain vast crawlable data in addition to data from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office etc. Academic research is underway in this area with UZH conducting a NRP funded effort to develop a Swiss Job Market Monitor.
Benefits
The Skill Radar once developed will provide all stakeholders in Fribourg an invaluable tool to understand how emerging trends in the Global and regional labour market will impact them and develop mitigation strategies. Such strategies would typically involve designing customized skill development interventions utilizing the Skill Bridge.