Skill demand versus skill use: Comparing job posts with individual skill use on the job

Moira Daly, Fane Groes and Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen

Labour Economics, 2025, vol. 92, issue C

Abstract: Skill requirements in a job post reflect an employer’s “wish list,” but do they also reflect skills used on the job by the hired worker? We compare skill measures derived from the text of online job posts with individual-level data from the Danish Labour Force Survey (LFS) in which participants report their main skills used on the job as free text. By identifying individual workers from the LFS who can be matched to a job post, we validate that the extensive margin skills measures derived from job postings data reflect main skills used on the job. Thus, using job postings data to analyze skill use on the job is generally a valid empirical strategy. However, we also show that heterogeneity in returns to skills is missed if only the extensive margin of skill demand is considered.

Keywords: Skills; Tasks; Job postings; Labour force survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092753712400157X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:92:y:2025:i:c:s092753712400157x

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102661

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().