Jobs Cluster Analysis

The aim of attending university and studying for an Information Technology degree would, I
expect, be to get a job and start a career in Information Technology. However, waiting until the end
of your degree before you start seeking your job is a mistake. You don’t want to get to the end of
your degree and find that you should have chosen different electives or practised different
methodologies or experimented with different tool sets. You need to know what skills prospective
employers are looking for in a prospective employee well before you finish your degree.

The Jobs Cluster Analysis is a systematic method of identifying clusters of potential required skills.
Performing the analysis once is also insufficient, you must keep an eye on the skills employers are
seeking as new technologies, new methodologies and new toolsets are constantly emerging.

How to perform the Jobs Cluster Analysis:

(1) Identify jobs aggregation websites eg:

seek.com.au
jobs.co.uk
http://medicsolve.com/us-jobs/ (a list of job websites in the USA)

(2) Start searching for the type of job that currently interests you, eg:

• graduate analyst programmer,

• graduate IT Networks
• Cyber Security
• graduate database administrator
• graduate web developer
• etc.

You may need to experiment with search terms to get the right kind of jobs returned from the
search. Different countries may also use different terminology so be prepared try a variety of
synonyms to get the results you desire. For instance, on some job aggregation websites,
using the term “graduate” in the search will result in jobs for new graduates. Using the same
search term on other websites will return jobs requiring five years experience.

Because jobs come and go, and you want to find a broad group of similar jobs, don’t limit
your job search geographically. Let the system return all the jobs it can find within the
search country. Note that even if you are using a recruiter’s search engine, it may return
results from other recruitment companies. This could lead you to another job search engine.

Do not include irrelevant jobs in your data, for example: a job for a security guard is not
relevant to a graduate searching for jobs in Cyber Security.

(3) Save the search results page and save the responsive jobs.

Between the start of your jobs research and the finish, many of the jobs you found will have
disappeared. So that you don’t lose this prospective data source, save the web pages for
individual jobs. If you are searching for multiple job types or the same job types in different
countries, make sure you save the different type/country web pages into different folders.
 Find at least a dozen different jobs for each search term. Be careful since the same job might
be advertised through multiple agencies or appear on multiple aggregation web sites. The
same company might be advertising the same job type at multiple geographic locations. It
could look like you have found a dozen jobs but it turns out to be four jobs advertised across
different localities and agencies. Keep searching until you have found a good selection.

Use ‘Print to PDF’ to capture the details of each job.

(4) Begin collating the jobs and skills information.

For this task use some blank paper to record notes. Use one page to record the list of wages
and industries (eg financial sector, banking, …). Use another page to list out the skills and
count how often they appear in the different job advertisements. You might find it helpful to
print the first page of each job advertisement (provided it contains the bulk of the relevant
information).

To simplify the list of skills you may have to combine some of the required skills if they are
related, for instance you might have a column labelled “anything.NET” because some
advertisers will list every variation of .NET technology.

Once you have collected the data, create a spreadsheet listing the skills in one column and
the count or tally in another column. Add them in order biggest to smallest and plot them
with a bar chart.

(5) Resolve unknown terms.

IT Jobs will be advertised with a plethora of acronyms and while some are reasonably
obvious others will be obscure.

Example 1: what do all these terms mean? Graduate / Junior .NET Developer (ASP.NET,
C#, C#.NET, dot NET, Web Application Development, Desktop, Winforms, Windows
Forms, .NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 5, WCF, WPF, MVVM, Prism, Continuous Integration,
Dependency Injection, Ninject, Spring.net, IoC, Unity, Castle Windsor, TDD, NUnit, MSTest,
Mocking, Moq, RhinoMocks, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Urgent)

Example 2: .NET Developer (Graduate / Junior, ASP.NET, C#, C#.NET, dot NET, Web
Application Development, .NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 5, SQL Server 2014, Agile, Scrum,
Kanban, TDD, NUnit, RhinoMocks, Moq, BDD, ORM, LINQ, NHibernate, Urgent)

To understand the requirements of the job you have to understand the acronyms and once
you understand the acronyms you get a better understanding of how they fit together and if
they belong in a particular ecosystem.

(6) After completing steps (4) and (5) above, perform an in-depth analysis of the various jobs.

It will become obvious that many terms are related. In the first example of point (5), Agile,
Scrum, Kanban and TDD are related and refer to the software development methodologies.
TDD, NUnit, MSTest. Mocking, Moq and RhinoMocks are related to each other and the
discipline of testing (TDD is shared across two domains). The terms Dependency Injection,
 Ninject, Spring.net, IoC, Unity, Castle Windsor are related to a code development
methodology and development frameworks that are closely aligned with .NET development.

In the cases of the two jobs identified above, they share a common core of .NET
development tools including web development tools. They share common software
development methodologies, they share common development frameworks and common
testing tools and frameworks. They only vary slightly in some of the specific tools and that
one of the jobs also involves some database work. These differences are so small as to be
negligible.

Not discussed above were the interpersonal skills of communications, teamwork, team
leading etc. Often the job advertisement will highlight the key terms in a slew of acronyms
(as shown in the two examples previously ) and then list out a series of personal and
professional attributes required by the candidate. These will need to be analysed and counted
as for the other requirements.

(7) Create your skills analysis presentation.

How you do this is up to you. You could create a set of bar charts that show the frequency of
appearance of different terms/technologies. In this case you could have different bar charts
for different dimensions such as:
• personal & professional skills and attributes
• programming languages
• software development methodologies
• development frameworks and toolsets

This breakdown may be insufficient to fully explore the complexity of the job market so
other graphical techniques might be useful. In a quick sampling of 10 jobs it was observed
that every job mentioned Agile/Scrum, nearly all mentioned TDD, one less mentioned BDD
and five mentioned Kanban. A number of the jobs were highly Microsoft/.NET centric while
others were predominately based on Open Source toolsets and open languages. This kind of
distribution could be shown using a graph (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics) ) where the nodes represent a
particular technology/methodology cluster and the links between the nodes represent the
linking of these clusters in particular jobs. For Example: If you were looking for web
developer jobs and there were five (out of ten) jobs listing the combination of HTML-
JavaScript-PHP-MySql (or MariaDB). Four of those five jobs along with three others listed
agile/scrum as the software development methodology while the fifth job plus two others
mentioned a different software development methodology. A simple graph representing this
could look as below:

5
5
HTML
Language Blah
JavaScript
Language Yada
PHP
MySQL
1
3
4 2
Rudimentary Graph Example with just the coding
language and development methodologies 7
AGILE/SCRUM 3
(5 BDD) RAD
(2 Kanban)
(8) Finally, putting it all together.

Your jobs cluster analysis should include:

• A summary page or pages that include:
◦ A brief introduction to the purpose and your process.
◦ The type of job or jobs you are looking for in your search.
◦ Identification of the source or sources of the data (and a count of jobs found from each
source).
◦ A breakdown of the wages (wage range, average wage, typical wage).
◦ A breakdown of jobs by industry (banking and finance, games development, accounting,
…).
◦ The actual jobs clusters and breakdown by skill type as described in (7).
• A short discussion on anything unusual that you observed (if there was something unusual).
• A glossary of all the terms used in the advertisements.

A possible layout is attached, please note, this is only an example.

What you hand in:

A paper copy of your Jobs Cluster Analysis with your CV and an electronic copy of your CV and
Jobs Cluster Analysis AND a zip of the folder containing all the job webpages you used in your
research. If you used the newspaper for job searching you should include a scan or readable photo
of the relevant job, page or pages.

Jobs Cluster Analysis example marking. Marks shown below are a guideline, if something is
missing you will definitely lose marks but out-of-the-box thinking or excellence in one area may
counteract poorer work in another.
This list generally refers to content not section naming.
Overall Presentation 1
Introduction 1
Method 1
Results
Wages 0.5
Industry Sector 0.5
Skills: 2.5
Technical Skills
Personal skills/attributes
Methodologies
Frameworks/Toolsets
Analysis 1
Conclusion 0.5
Glossary 1
Jobs List (real and relevant jobs) 1
Total 10
Bill Smith (smbi1803)

Under no circumstances import this PDF into word. Create a new document.

INTRODUCTION

Introduce the reader to the purpose and process of the Jobs Cluster Analysis. This gives the reader an
explanation of why you are doing the analysis, how you are doing the analysis and what you are looking for in
the analysis. Don’t forget to tell the reader what job you are searching for.

METHOD

Describe the actual method you are using to gather and collate the data. Give the exact search terms you used
and the jobs search websites you used. Explain how you checked that the jobs were relevant and if you
removed any from the results. If you had to experiment to find the best search term for your desired job
include the steps here.

RESULTS

You must include the number of jobs included in your analysis.

You must include the data on:

Wages

Industry sector

Personal / Professional Skills (interpersonal communications, teamwork, … )

Technical Skills (eg: programming languages if looking for a programming job)

Any methodologies, development frameworks and/or toolsets (If any of these are not relevant to the
specific job type or are not mentioned in any job then they are not required)

If some jobs include some of the above data and others don’t then include the data but indicate how many
jobs included the information.

Example Graph:
Bill Smith (smbi1803)

ANALYSIS

Discuss the results, was there anything interesting or unexpected? Were there contradictions, distinct clusters
of skills, obvious skills you will need to target in your studies?

CONCLUSION

Summarise your job cluster analysis and focus on the key outcomes.

GLOSSARY

List all the key terms you found in the job ads.

AngularJS AngularJS is a JavaScript-based open-source front-end web application framework mainly

maintained by Google and by a community of individuals and corporations to address many
of the challenges encountered in developing single-page applications. (source: Wikipedia)
Bootstrap Bootstrap is an open source toolkit for developing with HTML, CSS, and JS. It allows quick
prototyping of an idea or the building of an entire app with Sass variables and mixins,
responsive grid system, extensive prebuilt components, and powerful plugins built on jQuery.
(source: getbootstrap.com)

APPENDIX: JOBS SUMMARY

(a) Include a table of the jobs used in the survey (name of job, stated wages, job location, jobsite where
found, abbreviated job role)
(b) Include a screenshot of the jobs site that best matched your search criteria (example below)
Bill Smith (smbi1803)