European Management Journal 40 (2022) 671–684

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European Management Journal

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emj

Employability skills: Profiling data scientists in the digital labour market

Francesco Smaldone a, d, *, Adelaide Ippolito b, Jelena Lagger c, Marco Pellicano a
a
Department of Business Sciences, Management & Innovation Systems, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084, Fisciano, SA, Italy
b
Department of Human Sciences, Pegaso Telematic University, Centro Direzionale, Isola F2, 80143, Napoli, NA, Italy
c
School of Management, University of Bath, Convocation Avenue, BA2 7AZ, Bath, Somerset, United Kingdom
d
Department of Law, Economics, Management & Quantitative Methods, University of Sannio, Palazzo de Simone, Piazza Arechi II, 82100, Benevento, BN, Italy

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In the current scenario, data scientists are expected to make sense of vast stores of big data, which are becoming
Data scientist increasingly complex and heterogeneous in nature. In the context of today’s rapid technological development
Employability and its application in a growing array of fields, this role is evolving simultaneously. The present study provides
Labour market
an insight into the current expectations of employers seeking to hire individuals with this job title. It is argued
Skills
Text mining
that gaining a better understanding of data scientists’ employability criteria and the evolution of this professional
Topic modelling role is crucial. The focus is placed on the desired prerequisites articulated through job advertisements, thus
deriving relevant means for furthering theory and practice. It was achieved by harvesting relevant data from job
advertisements published on US employment websites, which currently attract the US market’s highest
recruitment traffic. The key contribution of this study is to have identified means of systematically mapping
skills, experience, and qualifications sought by employers for their data scientists, thus providing a data-driven
pathway for employability and avoiding skills gaps and mismatches in a profession that is pivotal in the Industry
4.0.

1. Introduction
The digital market’s ongoing evolution has created an objective and
growing need for professionals equipped to work with cyber technolo­
gies. In this context, data analytics are becoming increasingly valuable
for companies, and thus possessing active knowledge of data science is
also increasingly crucial for applicants (Provost & Fawcett, 2013;
Ransbotham & Kiron, 2017). As this is a domain undergoing perpetual
development, there is a lack of consensus about what qualifies an indi­
vidual at the recruitment stage as a potential asset to an organisation.
This paper evaluates the possibility of creating a metric to support this
decision-making process.
Presently, organisations worldwide pay great attention to human
capital, which is crucial to the vitality of an economic system
(Quintini, 2014; Shields & Kameshwara, 2020). When referring to
human capital, three established levels of analysis are considered: the
individual (micro), which can be defined as “the knowledge, skills,
competencies and other attributes embodied in individuals or groups of
individuals acquired during their life and used to produce goods,
services or ideas in market circumstances” (Westphalen, 1999, p. 4); the
organisational (meso), which represents the sum of the core compe­
tencies of the individuals employed in an organisation (Prahalad &
Hamel, 1990); and the market (macro)1, in which the competencies of a
workforce are commonly measured via academic qualifications as a
proxy (Healy & Côté, 2001; Houldsworth et al., 2019). Consequently,
the nature and synergy of people’s hard and soft skills in a determined
context are considered essential for the sustainability and quality of a
labour market (Zhou et al., 2020).
The dynamics of labour markets in recent years have suggested
increasing discrepancies between skills supply and skills demand. One
reason for this is the spread of the Internet and social media, which are
intrinsically linked to the digitalisation of the economy and the world of
work (Pekkala & van Zoonen, 2022) and are intensified by the forces
underpinning globalisation (Baccarella et al., 2018, 2020; Smaldone
et al., 2020; Stathopoulou et al., 2019). Even if these dynamics are
contemporarily promoting the democratisation of educational schemes,

* Corresponding author. Department of Business Sciences, Management & Innovation Systems, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, 84084, Fisciano,
SA, Italy.
E-mail addresses: fsmaldone@unisa.it (F. Smaldone), adelaide.ippolito@unipegaso.it (A. Ippolito), jll62@bath.ac.uk (J. Lagger), pellicano@unisa.it
(M. Pellicano).
1
The market can cover societal, technological, economic, environmental, and political contexts.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2022.05.005
Received 18 April 2021; Received in revised form 19 April 2022; Accepted 26 May 2022
Available online 21 June 2022
0263-2373/© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/).
F. Smaldone et al.
the online medium’s widespread use is also giving the Industry 4.0 a
polysemantic character. To put it another way, citizens’ online behav­
iour patterns represent and perpetuate widespread lifestyle changes. The
“new normal” ensuing from these dynamics results in individuals’
altered and often elevated expectations regarding an array of areas
(CEDEFOP, 2012; Smaldone et al., 2020; Stringfield & Stone, 2017).
Consequently, professionals working in the digital domain also need to
navigate and negotiate these dynamics effectively.
Unsurprisingly, these web-driven developments have significantly
increased the demand in the labour market for professionals connected
to the world of data science, particularly programmers, software de­
signers, and application experts, as in the case of the marketing industry
(Di Gregorio et al., 2019). Furthermore, they have also created a
growing need for expertise in areas that have only recently emerged,
such as cybersecurity and blockchain technology. These changes drive
companies and institutions’ growing requirement to employ people with
the necessary skills to process and manage several types of data, which
are also often of a heterogeneous nature (Provost & Fawcett, 2013;
Ratner, 2017, pp. 1–13; Schoenherr & Speier-Pero, 2015). Further to
this, firms operating in a range of sectors increasingly need skills like
data analysis (Provost & Fawcett, 2013), thus potentially requiring
professionals to have sector-specific know-how as well. Provost and
Fawcett (2013) identified how numerous companies have evolved in
direct response to the need to manage and process big data, but data
science involves much more than the elaboration of algorithms to
extract data. Consequently, a precondition exists that the data scientist
must be able to analyse companies’ problems from a big data perspective
(Swan & Brown, 2008). According to Ransbotham and Kiron (2017), the
data analytics market represents the main field applying these new
professional figures. In 2016, Italy’s Istituto Nazionale di Statistica
(https://www.istat.it) reported the relevant growth of 15% in the Italian
market, reaching a total value of 905 million euros. In a breakdown,
business intelligence has remained the predominant industry, with €722
million (+9% in one year), but the big data industry (€183 million) has
grown by as much as 44%. Most of this market comprises multinationals
and large companies (87% of the total expenditure), with the remaining
13% coming from small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This would
indicate that these dynamics manifest in a variety of sectors and involve
different types of organisations. Operating fluently with big data is now
a prerequisite in both scientific and working contexts. In specie, the
technological evolution represents the disruptive transition from the 1.0
analytics of questionnaires to the 2.0 of big data analytics. Thus, an
increasing requirement of hard and soft skills is emerging to face new
market contexts.
The big questions arising at this stage are as follows: based on what is
a person’s level of qualification perceived in these new areas? And what are
the criteria to make such a person employable? On the one hand, the
relationship between ability levels and employment chances is un­
doubtedly highly significant (Mason et al., 2009; Rosenberg et al.,
2012), especially concerning emerging professional profiles (Korczyn­
ski, 2005). In other words, desirable skills are intrinsically linked to the
needs of the labour market (Chaibate et al., 2020; Ijaola et al., 2020). On
the other hand, as with the aforementioned macro-level analysis of
human capital, people’s level of academic qualification has long served
as a proxy for the evaluation of skills, especially among economists and
sociologists (Danford et al., 2009; Edwards et al., 2009; Goetsch & Davis,
2014). Thus, people’s employability has long been exclusively measured
by way of academic qualifications (Acosta & Muller, 2018). For man­
agers, these two interpretations underpin the reigning lack of consensus
in the perception and definition of the relevant attributes that human
resources need to possess (Winkler et al., 2013).
According to the International Labour Organization (International
Labour Organization, 2018), there is a deepening divide between the
essential skills desired by entrepreneurs (Denrell & Le Mens, 2020;
Mahmud et al., 2014) and the qualifications that applicants bring to the
table (Acosta & Muller, 2018). This would indicate a growing
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European Management Journal 40 (2022) 671–684
employability mismatch and emphasise the importance of gaining a
thorough understanding of the skillset required for data scientist roles
(Davenport & Patil, 2012).
Notwithstanding the limited reliable data and the ambiguity linked
to the job description of data scientists, an increasingly clear profile of
the data scientist professionals is emerging (Stanton & Stanton, 2020.
Based on the previous considerations, the following research ques­
tions emerged:
RQ1: What are the most sought-after skills for data scientists in job
advertisements?
RQ2: What thematic areas emerge when analysing data scientists’
prerequisites informing their employability?
RQ3: What are the most correlated skills in a data science job
advertisement?
The present study is underpinned by a literature review on the digital
domain exploring the relationship between the relevant skills sought by
the labour market and employability. It provides the reader with a
spectrum of empirical analyses conducted with an array of methods.
Starting with an analysis of the literature on employability, the review
was designed specifically to consider the analyses developed by Fugate
et al. (2004) and Fugate (2006), and to then consider the types of skills
required for employability, paying close attention to the theoretical
framework of Pool and Sewell (2007).
In sum, the purpose of this research is to shed light on employability
skills in the age of big data and their implications in the digital labour
market and aims to determine the skillsets data scientists must possess to
match entrepreneurs professed desirable characteristics. As such, on a
theoretical level, this paper contributes to the current literature in the
domain and, on a practical level, offers tangible insight into how the
employability mismatch for data scientists can be bridged. To do so, job
advertisements for data scientists in the American market were extrac­
ted by employing web-scraping and profiling techniques to identify the
salient competencies required by enterprises. The originality of this
study lies in its systematisation of the analytic process that underpins the
purposeful mapping of the skills sought by employers of data scientists,
hence permitting both tangible verifications of the current labour mar­
ket’s demands and strategic forecasting for the development of human
capital.
This paper is presented with the following structure: Section 2 re­
views the extant literature on employability and employability skills
with a focus on hard and soft skills, as well as the role of the data sci­
entist; Section 3 reports data collection and profiling techniques; Section
4 highlights the results; Section 5 discusses the findings; Section 6 as­
sesses the implications of this study, draws conclusions, and addresses
limitations and directions for future research.
2. Theoretical framework
Data science is on the front lines of the digital renaissance and In­
dustry 4.0 and is an interdisciplinary field that deals with the extraction
of knowledge from data (Estensoro et al., 2021). It does so by making
sense of large amounts of data to derive meaningful insights that can be
used, for example, to generate data-driven recommendations for orga­
nisations that serve to underpin evidence-based decision-making. As a
specialisation, data science exists in the intersection of the fields of
computer science, statistics, and discipline-specific specialist knowledge
(Brown et al., 2003). Among other things, data science professionals are
expected to be able to analyse substantial amounts of data, identify
patterns, trends, and anomalies, as well as statistically predict future
occurrences.
Data science can be applied in an array of areas dealing with digital
interactions in which data are imported or generated. It can be partic­
ularly decisive in situations in which large amounts of data are present
and require systematic sense-making processes. Due to the increasing
F. Smaldone et al.
volume of digital data, there is, in parallel, an increasing demand for
data science specialisations. Nevertheless, due to the newness of the
professional role and its interdisciplinary nature, there is still not a full
alignment between the expectations of employers and the credentials of
job seekers, affecting employability. These employer expectations are
reflected in job advertisements, which detail, among other things, a
position’s duties, tasks, and activities, as well as an applicant’s required
hard and soft skills, competencies, qualifications and work experience
(Armstrong & Taylor, 2020).
While it is crucial for job seekers to be able to find suitable
employment, it is likewise essential for employers to engage with a well-
qualified talent pool. To achieve this engagement, it is necessary to fine-
tune the scope of the respective expectations of supply and demand. The
present section focuses on mapping the literature on pivotal criteria
pertinent to this dynamic by contextualising the constructs of employ­
ability and employability skills, as well as the parameters of hard and
soft skills, and relates these to the role of the data scientist.
2.1. Employability
Employability is herein defined as an individual’s portfolio of previ­
ously acquired knowledge, skills, attitudes, competencies, experiences,
and other qualifications that underpin their ability to be a reliable source
of efficiency, innovation, and productivity to an employer. Hence, this
term serves as a means of identifying an equilibrium between supply and
demand in the labour market. The definition can be used at multiple
levels of analysis, namely the micro-level (individual), so as to bench­
mark one’s probability of being employed in a given context, at the
meso-level (organisation), which aims to recruit talent with specific
criteria, as well as the macro-level (market), which needs to maximise
the potential value of human capital. In this manner, the burden of re­
sponsibility for employability can also be shifted between the levels and
the stakeholders as needed. This definition is driven by the under­
standing that employability is a construct, or an abstract idea that one
wishes to assess, that can combine multiple dimensions connected
through predefined features. The measurement of this abstract idea is
based on the operationalisation of its dimensions (Dew, 2008). For the
current study, employability refers to the intersection between the de­
mand of employers in the labour market and the expectations posed
upon job seekers, as signalled through job advertisements. The di­
mensions are dictated by the specific terminology used within these
advertisements. We will refer to these dimensions in the aggregate as
desirable characteristics.
While the term employability can be sporadically found from about
the 1940s, its understanding has shifted exponentially over time. For
example, Long (1942) uses it in a rather transactional manner, referring
to it in terms of the “willingness and ability to work upon economic
conditions” (p. 5) and proposing an employability equation assessing
how “the marginal product of the worker bring in marginal revenue
equal to or exceeding the wage of the worker” (p. 14). A decade later,
Feintuch added the element of attitude as a moderating dimension to the
ability to “find and keep employment” (1955, p. 1). Relevant research
over the following decades was intrinsically linked to the dynamics of
the labour market, as well as to the relationship between employers and
employees (Thijssen et al., 2008), as long-term full employment in one
organisation was at that time the norm. These conversations were often
moderated by macro-circumstances, such as the increasing labour de­
mands fuelled by post-war growth, as well as recessions. In this period,
there was growing interest in vocational counselling, as well as in
studying how the unemployed went about finding employment (Gott­
fredson, 1981). Besides maintaining a macro-perspective in these
studies, labour economists also fostered the analytic approach of seg­
menting the workforce by education level and occupational stratifica­
tion, such as white-collar and blue-collar groups (Fugate et al., 2021).
White collar refers to people working in managerial, administrative, and
clerical positions, while blue-collar workers engage in manual labour. At
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the time, there was also an underlying presupposition that “these two
categories index major differences both in the types of jobs workers
perform and in the life circumstances that accompany the jobs” (Weaver,
1975, p. 167).
Moving away from the concept of the traditional career and how that
informed employability, in 1986, Hall proposed the notion of the pro­
tean career, or “one in which the person, not the organisation, is in
charge, [and] the core values are freedom and growth, and the main
success criteria are subjective (psychological success) vs. objective
(position, salary)” (Hall, 2004, p. 4). This shift in approach to careers is
also seen as a foreshadowing of a transforming labour market in which
the model of life-long employment within one organisation would
dwindle. This would gradually begin to imply that individuals would
have to take more responsibility for managing their own professional life
cycles (Fugate et al., 2021). Common areas of reflection in this stream of
research included further elaboration on the dimensions of the protean
career, such as attitudes linked to strong elasticity and an ability to
manage multiple identities and job roles (Hall & Mirvis, 1995), as well as
characteristics that would permit workers to develop a work-path
without precise boundaries and consisting of different positions within
multiple organisations (Arthur, 1994; Hall, 2002; Mirvis & Hall, 1994).
While the term career, as understood today, can indicate various
things, such as “a series of jobs, […] a cumulative set of experiences,
[…] vehicles for self-expression, and a process of adult development”
(Newman, 2011, p. 137), in a time when stable employment was com­
mon, the notion of the implications of the protean career was quite
extraordinary. Nevertheless, since then and to this day, this view of the
self-managed career in an unstable labour market has been the under­
current of the trajectory of employability research.
This shift becomes evident, for example, in Fugate et al. (2004)
where the term employability is used to indicate a series of concepts
supporting the employee in adapting to changes in the work environ­
ment and facilitating the realisation of rising career opportunities. The
context-dependent dimensions of employability Fugate identified were
(a) career identity, which constitutes the employee’s self-representation
based on their own experiences and work aspirations, (b) individual
adaptability, or the ability of the worker to adapt to the dynamism of the
working environment, and (c) human and social capital, which form the
social and interpersonal aspects of employability (Fugate et al., 2004).
Subsequently, Fugate (2006) elaborated upon the concept of disposi­
tional employability, which was seen as “a constellation of individual
differences that predispose employees to (pro)actively adapt to their
work and career environments” (p. 20). This aspired to put employees in
the position to develop, adapt, or better anticipate the turbulent changes
and uncertainty in the workplace (Fugate & Kinicki, 2008) and also
aimed to represent a compass for job seekers.
While the responsibility of an employer to maintain an employee’s
employability by guiding and fostering their development has been
addressed, also from a legal perspective (see Government of the United
Kingdom, 2021), there is a continuing trend of shifting that develop­
mental responsibility from the employer to the employee in the process
of career building. Thus, the approach to employability in this view
continues to call for proactive agency on the part of the individual in
fostering their own flexibility, which enables them to successfully
respond to the demands of the market (Chan, 2000; Savickas, 2005).
Indications of these market demands that need to be responded to can be
identified, for example, by scrutinising the content of job advertisements
(see CEDEFOP, 2020), which the present study has analysed in reference
to the role of the data scientist.
In conclusion, there are three principal considerations:
(1) Despite there being various understandings of the construct of
employability, these have also undergone substantial changes
over time, and many of these share core ideas that clearly position
employability as a term used to identify the dynamics and criteria
leading to the employment of individuals.
F. Smaldone et al.
(2) While employability may be, at one level, driven by individual
agency, the employer who dictates their staffing needs to the
market cannot be disregarded as an essential constituent in this
conversation.
(3) There exists a lack of consensus not only in the understanding of
employability but also with regard to the use of key terms that
would inform its operationalisable dimensions. These include
employability skills, hard skills, and soft skills (Taylor, 2005).
Nevertheless, by engaging with the relevant literature, this paper
will provide operational definitions.
2.2. Employability skills
The topic of employability skills bears importance for an array of
stakeholders, and has, for example, been defined as “individual assets
possessed by workers and job seekers, and the extent to which these tie
in with the immediate needs of employers” (McQuaid & Lindsay, 2005,
p. 205) in academic circles and as “the key skills and personal attributes
you need to enter, operate and thrive in the new world of work”
(Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry & Business Council of
Australia, 2002, p. 3) among policy-makers. It is possible to divide
employability skills into hard skills and soft skills, the latter sometimes
being referred to as transversal skills, which are “typically considered as
not specifically related to a particular job, task, academic discipline or
area of knowledge but as skills that can be used in a wide variety of
situations and work settings” (UNEVOC, 2021). Both hard and soft skills
are vital for organisational and worker effectiveness and are seen as
interconnected concepts (Wang et al., 2022). The lack of one of these
could negatively affect an individual’s performance and ability to be
productive and find or maintain a job (Mishra, 2014). While the com­
plementary nature of the two persists, the articulated requirement for
hard skills is moving out of the limelight, and soft skills are in increasing
demand among employers, as they are seen as reliable indicators of
high-performance outcomes (Bacon & Blyton, 2003; Becker et al., 2019;
Heckman & Kautz, 2012). Soft skills are therefore taking on an
increasingly pivotal role in the employability of an individual (Heckman
& Kautz, 2012; Mishra, 2014).
Various useful tools can be found in the literature with which to
conduct a skills analysis. Among these, Pool and Sewell’s CareerEDGE
model (2007) is a well-known example. In this “Key to Employability
Model”, the analysed dimensions take the metaphorical form of a “key”
that opens the door to the world of work but also traces a path of
continuous learning. The five dimensions analysed by the model are all
critical and interrelated: (1) career development learning; (2) experi­
ence (work and life); (3) degree subject knowledge, understanding, and
Table 1
Literature review on hard skills.
Hard skills
Source Focus area
Woya (2019) Statistics graduates
Siddoo et al. (2017) Developing an IT workforce
Nurlaela et al. (2017) University economics department
Oviawe et al. (2017) Technical education
Entika et al. (2017) Civil engineering practice
Stringfield and Stone (2017) Career and technical education
Alamelu et al. (2017) IT software professionals
Harris and King (2015) Developing technical skills
Murdoch (2015) The gap between law school and the workplace
Marsithi and Alias (2013) Engineering graduates
Wolf and Archer (2013) Business degrees
Atkins (2013) English young people
Gokuladas (2011) Undergraduate engineering students in India
Hinchliffe and Jolly (2011) Graduate employability
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European Management Journal 40 (2022) 671–684
skills; (4) generic skills (soft skills); and (5) emotional intelligence. Self-
efficacy, self-confidence, and self-esteem, as informed by prior learning,
create a strong link among the dimensions of this model (Pool & Sewell,
2007). Nevertheless, while employability continues to be upheld by the
presence of hard and soft skills, their building blocks and constellation
may shift over time based on changes in the world of work.
To further map the understanding of the topic, we searched the
Scopus database with keywords like “employability skills” and identi­
fied 66 relevant papers in English published between 2010 and 2021 in
management journals. These were further scrutinised via the review of
their abstracts, resulting in 29 pertinent publications. Tables 1 and 2
highlight the preceding types of skills, field of analysis, and factors
characterising the hard and soft skills therein identified.
2.2.1. Hard skills
Cimatti defined hard skills as “specific capabilities to perform a
particular job” (2016, p. 98). Hard skills are practical skills that can be
learned through study and practice and therefore depend on training
and work experience (Forde & MacKenzie, 2004). They can furthermore
be methodically assessed, measured, quantified, and accredited.
While different professions have different hard-skill requirements
(Harris & King, 2015; Stringfield & Stone, 2017; Wolf & Archer, 2013),
for the data scientist, these may include the use of particular equipment;
forms of systematic work with data and the use of relevant software
(Wang et al., 2022) or software development and/or programming;
statistical knowledge; quantitative analysis; the ability to use a variety of
analytical, statistical, and modelling tools; or specific industry knowl­
edge (Stanton & Stanton, 2020). As these hard skills are critical to the
effective and efficient execution of one’s job, they are seen as essential
prerequisites during personnel selection.
As the data scientist can be professionally active in an array of fields,
further attention must be paid to the field-specific hard skills that they
may need. Miller and Hughes (2017) conducted a study on the market
demand for data science skills, identifying six principal industries in
which data scientists are active as follows: namely, professional services,
finance and insurance, manufacturing, information, healthcare, social
assistance, and retail trade. This study leads to the understanding that
industry-specific specialist hard skills may be required in addition to
those that form the basis of the generic data scientist. Some examples
include job requirements like expertise in the e-commerce, gaming, or
retail industries (e.g., Director of Data Science, Metaverse – Meta);
modelling of biological data, experience with DNA/RNA sequencing
data analysis, and working with mammalian genomics and single-cell
sequencing (e.g., Senior Bioinformatics Data Scientist II/Staff Bioinfor­
matics Data Scientist – Inscripta Inc. Biotech); familiarity with ArcGIS
Skill types
Competency in statistics
Information technology competencies
Developing problem-solving skills
Capacity building
Entrepreneurial skills
Technical and social skills
Persistence of numerical ability, logical ability, domain knowledge,
communication skills, learning agility and adaptability, interpersonal skills
Verbal and written communication skills
Legal knowledge
Successful intelligence
Cultural awareness, excellent communication skills, the ability to
work in dispersed, often even virtual teams
Practical skills
Engineering knowledge, English language
Graduate identity through knowledge transfer
F. Smaldone et al.
Table 2
Literature review on soft skills.
Soft skills
Source Focus area
Mahfud et al. (2017) Hospitality industry
Petrovski et al. (2017) Volunteer work
Hirsch (2017) Workplace in general
Dejaeghere et al. (2016) Youth employability in Tanzania
Ngoma and Dithan Ntale (2016) Graduate employability in Uganda
De Fruyt et al. (2015) New workplace
Ramírez-Pérez et al. (2015) Mexican youths
Griffin and Annulis (2013) Manufacturing graduates in Mississippi
Hogan et al. (2013) Employability in general
Trilling and Fadel (2009) 21st century skills
and AutoCAD, as well as geological visualisation tools like EnviroInsite,
LeapFrog, gINT, and RockWorks (Environmental Data Manager/Data
Scientist – ERM: Environmental Resources Management; LinkedIn,
2022). In addition to these interdisciplinary hard skills, it has also been
found that an array of complementary soft skills is pivotal in the context
of this profession (Cimatti, 2016).
2.2.2. Soft skills
Soft skills is a widely used but much-debated term that has not found
general consensus in its definition or application. It represents the sum
of an individual’s inherent qualities that are intrinsically linked to per­
sonal attributes and are highly valuable in any profession. They are
applied in “dealing with others and managing oneself and one’s emo­
tions in a manner consistent with particular workplaces and organisa­
tions” (Hurrell et al., 2013, p. 162). Scholars and practitioners alike tend
to agree that soft skills should be considered within the context and type
of work in which they are applied (see Hurrell et al., 2013), and that
their application can be very specific in certain settings. For example, an
academic may need skills in public speaking, attention to detail, and
accepting criticism, while a diplomat requires cultural insight and a
talent for negotiation, and a doctor must be empathetic and emotionally
intelligent. In the case of the data scientist, desirable skills can include
such things as “the ability to communicate and present analytical in­
sights in an understandable and compelling way, collaborate and work
in teams, be creative/innovative, and […] solve complex problems”
(Stanton & Stanton, 2020, p. 147). Consequently, soft skills are difficult
to define within an all-inclusive concept (Matteson et al., 2016).
Nevertheless, the literature does venture to suggest that common core
soft skills, such as communication, leadership, problem-solving,
initiative, self-regulation, expertise, know-how, ambition, and ethics
(Alvarez & Alvarez, 2018; Fruyt et al., 2015; Hirsch, 2017; Hogan et al.,
2013), could be grouped within the skills categories of learning and
innovation, digital literacy, and life and career (Trilling & Fadel, 2009).
Whether soft skills can be taught is contentious, but they are
generally seen as cultivatable (Beheshti, 2018) and are crucial in settings
requiring human exchange. As they characterise the quality of interac­
tion, soft skills are pivotal not only in customer-facing jobs but also
where productive activities require group work or any interaction
among workers behind the scenes (Glitz, 2017; Glitz & Vejlin, 2019;
Heckman & Kautz, 2012). Furthermore, soft skills can be seen as com­
plementary to hard skills (Breen et al., 2020) and are deemed an asset
within the context of one’s employability (Griffin & Annulis, 2013). In a
time of proliferating automation, the importance of soft skills that
characterise a person psychologically and socially in the workforce is
thus becoming increasingly evident. As many soft skills remain well
beyond the reach of current technologies , such as artificial intelligence
European Management Journal 40 (2022) 671–684
Skill types
Ability to cooperate, focus on doing work, communication ability, honesty,
responsibility, creativity, work initiative, discipline, politeness and carefulness,
courtesy, responsiveness to consumer needs, cooperation, confidence
Reputation, social connections
Teamwork, communication, leadership, problem-solving, initiative, self-regulation
Social relations
Social capital, psychological capital, career identity
Willingness to work and do the job, work with/among others, fit in and endorse
the values of an organisation, show engagement with learning and
demonstrate flexibility and adaptability, envisage and invest in current and future career paths
Communication, teamwork, effective organisation
Communication, teamwork, problem-solving, work ethic
Social/interpersonal compatibility, abilities, expertise, know-how, ambition, work ethic
Learning and innovation skills, digital literacy, life and career skills
and robotics, the presence of these human attributes is increasingly
valued in the labour market, as well as in the realm of data science
(Stanton & Stanton, 2020). Unsurprisingly, their particular relevance in
the 21st century is evident across roles linked to data analytics
(Trilling & Fadel, 2009), as highlighted by the CEO of the Institute of
Analytics Professionals of Australia (IAPA): “while many more organi­
sations now have an analytics team, it is soft skills, like communication,
influencing and advocacy, that will ensure the business can take action
on analytics-driven insights. These are essential skills for analytics
professionals” (Dinham, 2018).
2.3. Data scientists
Over the past decade, the world has witnessed the rapid evolution of
new technologies, an evolution that has initiated the dawn of the In­
dustry 4.0. This new intersection of the digital, physical, and biological
spheres allows high-tech solutions like robotics, cloud computing, and
artificial intelligence to proliferate. To grasp these arising opportunities,
many organisations are reorienting their strategic focus and recruiting
human resources with adequate technical and analytical skills to face
this transformation. The data scientist has been called the sexiest job in
the 21st century (Davenport & Patil, 2012) and a unicorn in high de­
mand (Micallef, 2014). According to the World Economic Forum’s
Future of Jobs Report (2020), the data scientist will be one of the most
sought-after professionals in coming years.
It is estimated that between 2016 and 2018, 2.5 quintillion bytes of
data were created on a daily basis (Marr, 2018) and that these numbers
are growing exponentially over time. This generation of increasing
amounts of digital data is linked to widespread technologisation and
calls for professional figures who have the ability to harvest data sour­
ces, clean them, and convert the data sets into something scientifically
interpretable and upon which actions can be based. They furthermore
must be flexible, dynamic, and versatile within modern business
scenarios (Süß & Kleiner, 2010; Gehl, 2015) and be able to apply
advanced analytics to provide data-driven solutions that will support
organisational growth, sustainability, and competitive advantage
(Pesic et al., 2013; Stanton & Stanton, 2020; Zmuda, 2017).
Data science is furthermore an interdisciplinary field that unifies
areas like informatics, data analysis, and statistics and merges them with
other specialisations, which might include corporate support functions,
such as supply chain management (Schoenherr & Speier-Pero, 2015),
data management (Read, 2016), data integration, data governance, data
visualisation (Storey & Song, 2017), data management costs evaluation
(Tudoran et al., 2016), data structuring, database management, and
process mining (van der Aalst, 2016, pp. 3–23), operations and logistics
(Addo-Tenkorang & Helo, 2016), privacy and security management
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F. Smaldone et al.
(Chen et al., 2018), customised software development (Kim et al., 2016),
or process mining in healthcare (Mans et al., 2015). As data scientists are
thus engaged in various market sectors related both to industrial pro­
duction and the provision of services, common responsibilities might
include mining data, the analysis of stored target data, and the provision
of diagnostic, prescriptive, prospective, and predictive statistics to
support corporate management in creating value from business analytics
(Vidgen et al., 2017). Data scientists’ most common role within an
organisation is to conduct independent research and analysis
on enormous volumes of internally and externally sourced data
(Kim et al., 2016 ). They are experts who can derive insights from huge
amounts of structured and unstructured data in order to help define or
satisfy particular needs and business objectives, often using specifically
designed software. Their daily activities may include the collection of
data from various sources, such as databases, web analytics, social
media, electronic documents, and sensory information. Hereafter, they
will structure this heterogeneous data into organised and accessible
formats. To do so, they use software for data analysis, algorithms, sta­
tistical methods, and machine learning tools to navigate databases,
putting them through specific queries and extracting useful information
in their data mining. Thus, the data scientist can filter out irrelevant
data, keeping only value-providing information, making correlation
models, demonstrating causality, and developing scenarios and predic­
tive models. Subsequently, the results of a data analysis are simplified to
the degree at which they can be understood by all the relevant stake­
holders. In structuring and interpreting the extracted data, data scien­
tists implement advanced analytics programming, statistical techniques,
and methodologies, including machine learning, deep learning, data
mining, and text mining (TM) to manipulate data and use these in
modelling (Ratner, 2017, pp. 1–13; van der Aalst, 2016, pp. 3–23;
Witten et al., 2016). Furthermore, they are also mine trends, opportu­
nities, and hidden weaknesses within the data (Wang et al., 2016).
In terms of qualifications, data scientists require a solid discipline-
specific education, as well as further hard and soft skills. These may
include analytic problem-solving, effective communication abilities,
being able to work in a team and intellectual and technological aptitude,
as well as a comprehensive knowledge of the industry in which they are
employed. Costa and Santos (2017) explored a competency framework
and a skills framework in reference to data scientists, underlining that,
while hard skills provide an unequivocable base for the profession,
complementary soft skills are likewise essential to this hybrid and
interdisciplinary figure.
A complication arises when organisations report that traditional
degrees are not providing data scientists with the specific skills they
require (Business Higher Education Forum, 2017). Consequently, prior
work experience is greatly valued by employers, also as a compensatory
measure (NACE, 2018). Furthermore, up-skilling and additional edu­
cation are often necessary to create adequate professionals in this field
(Micallef, 2014), and organisations are also looking into developing
talent in-house (Meyer, 2019). In view of the increasingly complex and
multifaceted role of the data scientist, academic content and pedagogy
should be revisited (Rometty, 2018). A study by Stanton and Stanton
(2020) highlighted that formal qualifications in computer science
remain in demand, while, nevertheless, majors from the management
discipline are also highly sought by employers. This would indicate an
increasing need for data science professionals with business-specific
acumen, and that their credentials can cross disciplinary boundaries.
Considering the hybrid and interdisciplinary nature of the data scientist
role, which requires a combination of both discipline-specific and
domain-specific expertise, it may be hard to fully develop such a pro­
fessional role within a traditional education program. Nevertheless, at­
tempts in this respect are being made through some BSc programmes,
such as “Data Science and Journalism”; “Data Sciences for Justice, Law
and Criminology”; Data Science and Health Care”; “Data Science
and Psychology”; and “Precision Agriculture”, which bridges agronomy,
agricultural machinery management, and data sciences
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(StudyPortalsBachelors, 2021).
Future horizons indicate the imminent arrival of disruptive
augmented reality, in which data is leveraged in a pioneering and
meaningful way to overlay a virtual environments onto someone’s field
of vision (SocialVibes, 2021). In this virtual spaces, such as the meta­
verse, digital and physical lives will overlap (Clark, 2021). This complex
parallel dimension, in which people will socialise, work, and spend time,
will also require skilled professionals to harness, manage, and develop
its data-driven structure. Consequently, this will require the evolution of
apposite qualifications for data scientists, and education and up-skilling
will necessarily have to remain an ongoing conversation in parallel with
technological advances.
3. Material and Methods
3.1. Data collection
In the present study, job advertisements were extracted from job
search portals via web scraping to collect data for processing (Blázquez
Soriano et al., 2012). Web scraping is defined as “a technique of digital
data extraction from a website through a software parsing in real-time
instances wide-spreading hyperlinks reality” (Munzert et al., 2014, p.
11). To extract information from employment websites, a two-step
process was conducted: (1) detecting specific page URLs and (2)
extracting information and target data by completing the pre-designed
software task. Octoparse software (https://www.octoparse.com/) was
used for the parsing processes (Slamet et al., 2016). After choosing the
population, the existence of “data scientist” as a pre-defined keyword for
the opened job vacancies was verified to avoid a self-selection bias.
Then, the sampling method to perform was defined. According to the
literature (Iachan, 1982; Madow, 1949; Madow & Madow, 1944), sys­
tematic sampling was employed, choosing the first sample according to
random sampling and then keeping a fixed interval of k = 4, repre­
senting the value of the sampling interval (k = N/n) and thus ensuring
reliability. The choice of the US context was motivated by the fact that
this market offers around 5000 more job listings with the keyword “data
scientist” than does the European counterpart (6000 observations in the
US market against 3000 observations in the UK market, 2500 observa­
tions in the French market and just over 800 for the Italian market).
Performing web scraping, a sample of 1395 job advertisements from
the US market was obtained, recording 12,872 words in 1383 docu­
ments after excluding invalid cases. One of the chosen portals is classi­
fied as the third best job search website in the USA, as well as the most
accessible website for web scraping; thus, adequacy was ensured
through the screen-scraping interface (Liu et al., 2010; Robert Half,
2021). Extracted data were analysed using R software (https://www.
r-project.org/). Five dimensions were extracted from each job adver­
tisement: firm, location, open position, job description, and recommenda­
tions. The rationale for the breakdown of the dimensions was that
multiple variables were required for analytic purposes, and thus the
most common item labelling already present in the data source was
followed.
3.2. Profiling techniques
The profiling techniques were conducted in the following manner:
Phase one involved text analysis via TM to assess, clean, organise,
and extract knowledge from the corpus. Thereafter, occurrences and
patterns were identified to produce a graphic representation employing
a word cloud. Text analysis techniques have evolved considerably over
time (Berry, 2004), and TM represents the most complex extension of
data mining (Aggarwal & Zhai, 2012; Meyer et al., 2008). Since the
mid-1990s, this method has become essential to companies and in­
stitutions in dealing with excess information, which is also attributable
to the growing availability of IT resources. TM simultaneously connects
information-retrieval and information-extraction operations and is
F. Smaldone et al.
structured in distinct phases:
a) The pre-processing phase of texts, in which computer science pre­
vails, consists of finding text sources from the web and structuring
data (e.g., transformation into XML) into a document warehouse
(Haddi et al., 2013; Uysal & Gunal, 2014; Vijayarani et al., 2015);
b) The stage of lexical processing, consisting of recognising words
using, e.g., dictionaries, knowledge bases, semantic networks, or
sensigraphs to identify already known keywords or concepts, and
performing lemmatisation, defined as the recognition of the main
parts of speech (Fraser, 1999; Irwin, 1998; Paribakht, 2004);
c) The operational TM phase, in which statistics and data mining play a
crucial role, consists of the automatic categorisation of documents
for the subsequent retrieval of information search for entities (terms)
in texts (Chopra et al., 2018; Gupta & Lehal, 2009; Sullivan, 2001;
Tseng et al., 2007).
Linguistic queries, interpreted by natural language processing (NLP),
are also based on artificial intelligence algorithms and presuppose the
availability and alignment of specific linguistic resources in the lan­
guages investigated. After conducting text analysis, terminological
combinations were obtained in the form of n-grams through the weka
function. A tokenised document-term matrix (DTM) was then built,
recording 150,856/705,474 non-sparse entries. It was necessary to
reduce the matrix’s original sparsity (98%) to 33%. The maximum term
length was equal to 25.
Phase two concerned the classification of the skills into thematic
areas, employing a probabilistic topic modelling based on the latent
Dirichlet allocation to understand the principal characterising groups to
which employability is referred, analysing text entities (Jacobi et al.,
2016; Nikolenko et al., 2017; Rehurek & Sojka, 2010; Tong & Zhang,
2016). Topic modelling was performed via the topicmodels R package
after the DTM cleaning and the removal of zero entries. The interpre­
tation of probabilistic models is supported by the literature review.
In consideration of the need to understand the extant relationships
within the skillset that a data scientist should possess, phase three
aimed to compute the salient correlations in the DTM. These correlations
were mapped by testing mixed methods (Smaldone et al., 2021a,
2021b). Partial correlations were selected for visualisation purposes and
Fig. 1. Bar plot with frequency count.
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are shown together with the output of phase four.
In phase four, the visualisation of skills through a network lens was
generated (Granovetter, 1983). Here, the central interconnections
within the network were highlighted: computing bonds, standard de­
viation, direct and indirect density indices, and centrality measures. The
weights of the network are given by partial correlations. The nodes of
the network were not weighted because of the necessity of treating skills
at the same level concerning correlations and centrality analyses.
4. Results
The study analysed the corpus frequencies, exploring the weight of
the term frequencies (tf) through several analyses, as described in the
Material and Methods section. Results from the US market are particu­
larly interesting concerning the relationship between qualifications and
employability (Stanton & Stanton, 2020). Text analysis aimed to
investigate RQ1 via stylometry and frequency count. Fig. 1 reveals the
primary skills that an American data scientist should possess: big data (tf
= 2467), data processing (tf = 1479), algorithms (tf = 1479), artificial
intelligence (tf = 1377), software development (tf = 982), machine
learning (tf = 965), problem-solving (tf = 959), data sets (tf = 894),
work-in-team (tf = 887), data mining (tf = 883), software engineering
(tf = 876), data sources (tf = 874), information technology (tf = 868), r
(tf = 862), data analysis (tf = 843), soft skills (tf = 821), data manage­
ment (tf = 796), data technologies (tf = 789), years of experience (tf =
753), business solutions (tf = 738), analytics (tf = 726), data science (tf
= 721), business intelligence (tf = 714), deep learning (tf = 703), python
(tf = 699), data scientist (tf = 642), big data analytics (tf = 610),
bachelor’s degree (tf = 592), communication skills (tf = 585), hard skills
(tf = 578), and computer science (tf = 563). A weighted word cloud
showing the list of the core skills in the set is shown in Fig. 2. Exploring
RQ2, a latent Dirichlet allocation was employed, having as output a
probabilistic topic modelling employing for the skillset drawn in Fig. 3.
Regarding topic modelling, there were five significant topics in the
corpus of job descriptions. The first topic contains skills like
problem-solving (β = 0.435), soft skills (β = 0.203), bachelor’s degree (β
= 0.16), years of experience (β = 0.084), data mining (β = 0.067), py­
thon (β = 0.603), work in team (β = 0.53), communication skills (β =
0.048), artificial intelligence (β = 0.04), and data processing (β = 0.03).
F. Smaldone et al.
Fig. 2. Word cloud after sparsity reduction.
Problem-solving presented the highest β value. This thematic area can be
interpreted as the most suitable for describing generic hard and soft
skills that an American data scientist should have developed to solve
data science problems in the working environment. The second topic
included skills like bachelor’s degree (β = 0.31), hard skills (β = 0.073),
data processing (β = 0.071), computer science (β = 0.055), software
engineering (β = 0.047), data technologies (β = 0.039), data manage­
ment (β = 0.038), deep learning (β = 0.03), business intelligence (β =
0.035), and years of experience (β = 0.032). In this topic, β values are
almost identical, except for bachelor’s degree (β = 0.31), indicating that
the second topic refers to the hard skills that should develop during the
educational path of a candidate applying for a data scientist position.
Regarding the third topic, there is strong attention paid to big data and
artificial intelligence. In fact, this thematic area includes skills like big
data (β = .342), artificial intelligence (β = 0.293), years of experience (β
= 0.221), business solutions (β = 0.078), hard skills (β = 0.067), data
Fig. 3. Topic modelling of employability skills.
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science (β = 0.056), data management (β = 0.056), data technologies (β
= 0.054), deep learning (β = 0.051), and data sets (β = 0.05). As stated,
the topic concerns the knowledge and skills related to big data and
artificial intelligence, presenting the higher β values, and where having
years of experience plays a crucial role in defining the candidate’s
employability (β = 0.221). The fourth topic refers mainly to the
analytical skills that a candidate should possess at the moment of the
interview, grouping terms like hard skills (β = 0.4), analytics (β = 0.3),
data management (β = 0.2), r (β = 0.11), deep learning (β = 0.067), data
sources (β = 0.046), business intelligence (β = 0.044), python (β =
0.039), big data (β = 0.037), and big data analytics (β = 0.034).
The fifth and last topic comprises skills like work in team (β = 0.3),
communication skills (β = 0.19), data mining (β = 0.1), data sources (β
= 0.076), deep learning (β = 0.053), information technology (β = 0.04),
algorithms (β = 0.033), data analysis (β = 0.032), and artificial intelli­
gence (β = 0.031). With β = 0.3, it is possible to state that the fifth topic
refers to that task that should be performed in a team of data scientists
and the relative ability to work in a team, justified by the subsequent
presence of communication skills (β = 0.034). As stated in the Material
and Methods section, correlations were computed to investigate RQ3.
Partial correlations are shown in Fig. 4 to better interpret the weighted
network, where positive correlations are represented in green and
negative ones are represented in red. In the skillset, there were several
significant correlations, i.e., strong correlations were found between
problem-solving and data processing (ρ = 0.88), big data and informa­
tion technology (ρ = 0.82), data management and problem-solving (ρ =
0.79), machine learning and business intelligence (ρ = 0.74), and ma­
chine learning and python (ρ = 0.74).
Other correlated skills were found in the clique formed by data sci­
entist, deep learning, and algorithms. In fact, deep learning and algo­
rithms had ρ = .81, while data scientist and deep learning had ρ = 0.76.
Other interesting correlations were found between r and bachelor’s
degree (ρ = 0.8), analytics and data sources (ρ = 0.77), and years of
experience and data management (ρ = 0.61). Finally, the network of
partial correlations was evaluated, and centrality measures were
computed. The skills network is represented via a weighted network
alongside the spring layout algorithm’s implementation. The network
presented a directed density equal to 0.92, a ties’ mean of 16.1 and a
standard deviation (σ) of 2.71, showing good variability. The most
F. Smaldone et al.
Fig. 4. Weighted skills network with the representation of the partial correlations in the model.
central skills using normalised degree centrality were data technologies
(90%), big data analytics (86.6%), deep learning (83%), machine
learning (83%), and data mining (81%). The most between skill was
data management (standard betweenness = 87.4%), and the closest skill
was computer science (standard closeness = 83.2%).
5. Discussion
Active transformations in the arena of employment in the face of the
Industry 4.0 are propelled by the acceleration of technological ad­
vancements (Hirschi, 2018). Because of the speed of these de­
velopments, it is essential that monitoring and measuring take place at a
much faster pace than was previously necessary (Xu et al., 2018).
Consequently, while it is essential to ascertain the proximity to the
extant research in the sphere of employability, it is likewise necessary to
expand on previous insights by embracing the now-crucial variable of
rapid change.
As indicated in the research questions, this study aims to investigate
the characteristics of employees desired by employers in relation to the
data scientist profile, as signalled in job advertisements. This assumes
that, within recruitment processes, the definition of the relevant attri­
butes that human resources must possess are formulated in relation to
organisational needs (Winkler et al., 2013). This approach is particularly
reliable if an adequate job analysis was conducted a priori by the orga­
nisation, which then informed the listed job advertisement (Torrington
et al., 2020).
There are several considerations guiding the rationale of this study,
thus supporting the robustness of the research questions and the ensuing
discussion, which include (a) the indication of a strong correlation be­
tween levels of qualification and employability (Mason et al., 2009;
Rosenberg et al., 2012); (b) the particular relevance of the correlation of
credentials in the case of emerging professional profiles (Korczynski,
2005; Stanton & Stanton, 2020); and (c) the intrinsic link between the
needs of the labour market and the employability skills of the workforce
(Chaibate et al., 2020; Ijaola et al., 2020; McQuaid & Lindsay, 2005).
Consequently, the insights derived by identifying patterns in
workforce-skill demand, as expressed by employers, can serve to profile
employability criteria for data scientists in the digital labour market.
RQ1: What are the most sought-after skills for data scientists in
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job advertisements?
The research question was investigated via TM and frequency count.
Here, the results demonstrated interesting findings, raising a series of
new insights for managers working with the human capital that will be
further discussed. In fact, there is a continuous process of redefinition of
the market composition in terms of human and intellectual capital, as
highlighted by the most frequent bigram (tf = 2467), which was big
data. Big data is a highly desirable professional prerequisite, especially
with regard to emerging jobs related to data science, in line with pre­
vious research by Hall (2002) but showing different insights from the
literature. For example, while other studies aimed to “drive clarity upon
[…] skills required by firms to create value from big data” (De Mauro
et al., 2018, p. 1856), in the present study, it emerges that big data
analytics corroborates the other required skills for a data scientist, being
the second most central skill in the skills network in terms of normalised
degree centrality (86.6%). Herewith, big data analytics links years of
experience and communication skills to crucial soft skills in the network
(Härdle et al., 2018), highlighting the emerging role of big data as a
connector between hard and soft skills (Alamelu et al., 2017; Entika,
2017; Hirsch, 2017; Mahfud et al., 2017; Wolf & Archer, 2013; Woya,
2019), as well as the multitasking nature of these professionals (Klewes
et al., 2017). Nevertheless, other skills remain crucial for candidates
applying for data scientist positions as well. In fact, data processing (tf =
1479), artificial intelligence (tf = 1377), and algorithms (tf = 1283)
proved pivotal to candidates’ employability and more relevant in rela­
tion to other computer-science skills discussed in the literature (Marr,
2018). Furthermore, problem-solving abilities (tf = 959) were likewise
highly in demand, showing a different insight from previous research
(Micallef, 2014).
Term frequency for further desired core competencies featured
teamwork ability (Dufour et al., 2021) (tf = 887), various soft skills
(tf = 821), and communication skills (tf = 585). These results reinforce
the importance of possessing a mix of complementary hard and soft
skills with different insights from the literature whose implications will
be discussed (De Fruyt et al., 2015; Griffin & Annulis, 2013; Mishra,
2014; Pool & Sewell, 2007; Wang et al., 2022; Woya, 2019). Mastery of
hard skills, such as algorithms, data processing, R, Python, artificial
intelligence, data sources and analytics, has emerged from the textual
analysis, highlighting that, at present, employers still pay great attention
F. Smaldone et al.
to technical skills (Alamelu et al., 2017; Cimatti, 2016; Harris & King,
2015; Mishra, 2014; Oviawe et al., 2017; Woya, 2019). These results
align with thoseof other studies as well as with emerging market trends
in terms of employability, giving an additional added value to data
scientists’ profiling considering the presence of new prerequired skills
and the evolving nature of these professionals (Fugate et al., 2004,
2021).
RQ2: What thematic areas emerge when analysing data scien­
tists’ prerequisites informing their employability?
Here, the results highlighted five macro-areas of discussion
regarding the principal aspects of a desired skillset for data scientists.
The first topic represents the most suitable generic hard and soft skills
that an American data scientist should have developed to solve data
science problems in the working environment (Akter et al., 2016). It
includes those disciplines that are fundamental to a data scientist
entering the labour market. In this second topic, β values are comparably
similar, except in the case of the bachelor’s degree (β = 0.31), indicating
that the second topic refers to the hard skills that should be developed
during the educational path of a candidate applying for a data scientist
position. Nevertheless, the third topic emphasises the main skills as
being related to technological trends, such as big data (β = 0.342) and
artificial intelligence (β = 0.293), which are part of the hard-skills group
(Alamelu et al., 2017; Entika et al., 2017). The fourth topic refers mainly
to analytical skills that a candidate should possess at the moment of
hiring (Woya, 2019), while the fifth topic refers to tasks pertaining to
teamworking abilities among data scientists (Stanton & Stanton, 2020).
These results echo other scholars’ findings but at the same time give a
different in-depth analysis of the thematic areas emerging that are
crucial to data scientists’ employability, enabling the understanding of
the main arenas of competence and expertise that employers should
consider (Alamelu et al., 2017; Harris & King, 2015; Nurlaela et al.,
2017; Oviawe et al., 2017; Pool & Sewell, 2007; Savickas, 2005; Woya,
2019).
RQ3: What are the most correlated skills in a data science job
advertisement?
The correlation analysis highlighted several medium or strong cor­
relations through the skillset. The most considerable correlations were
found between problem-solving and data processing (ρ = 0.88), big data
and information technology (ρ = 0.82), data management and problem-
solving (ρ = 0.79), machine learning and business intelligence (ρ =
0.74), and machine learning and Python (ρ = 0.74), showing different
insights from other findings (Alamelu et al., 2017; Harris & King, 2015;
Woya, 2019). The first block of correlations shows that data processing
could represent a sort of “iceberg” for professionals working in digital
environments. These professionals require robust problem-solving skills
(Marr, 2018; Micallef, 2014), as well as the mastery of Python, which
was the most correlated software to perform machine learning tech­
niques (Stanton & Stanton, 2020). Other significant correlations were
found in a topic at the top of the network, which included the keyworks
data scientist, deep learning, and algorithms (Chaibate et al., 2020;
Ijaola et al., 2020). Deep learning and algorithms were strongly corre­
lated, having ρ = .81, while data scientist and deep learning had ρ =
0.76. Other strong relationships were found between R and bachelor’s
degree (ρ = 0.8), analytics and data sources (ρ = 0.77), and years of
experience and data management (ρ = 0.61). These findings coincide
with the scholarly literature (Oviawe et al., 2017; Siddoo et al., 2017;
Woya, 2019) but show new relationships through skills that should be
investigated deeply to understand the gap in other studies (Chaibate
et al., 2020; Foote, 2004; Ijaola et al., 2020). Moreover, the results
indicate that the most central skills, based on normalised degree cen­
trality, were data technologies (90%), big data analytics (86.6%), deep
learning (83%), machine learning (83%), and data mining (81%). This
once again shows the continuing redefinition of the market composition,
where mastery of data technologies is critical due to the ongoing tech­
nological evolution and the related redundancy of outdated protocols
(Stanton & Stanton, 2020). The process of dynamic obsolescence and the
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adoption of new digital technologies contemporarily call for the ability
to adapt to advancing big data analytics because of the strong market
demand and to engage in lifelong learning in parallel with this evolution
(Wang et al., 2022). The most between skill was data management
(standard betweenness = 87.4%), and the closest skill was computer
science (standard closeness = 83.2%). This is unsurprising, as the nature
of data science professionals is to perform data management on a daily
basis, and computer science is the most relevant science in operational
terms (Stanton & Stanton, 2020). There was a presence of three com­
munities based on co-membership in the network. Ties presented many
weights, highlighting a substantial difference in the relationships be­
tween skills. The results enrich previous studies in the literature, finding
different results because of the analytical point of view that focuses on
different shapes of employability (Alamelu et al., 2017; Hirsch, 2017;
Mishra, 2014; Nurlaela et al., 2017; Oviawe et al., 2017; Petrovski et al.,
2017; Wang et al., 2022).
6. Conclusions
The digital economy is swiftly evolving in line with the de­
velopments of the Industry 4.0 (CEDEFOP, 2012; de Vries et al., 2020;
Stringfield & Stone, 2017) and the knowledge economy (Bejinaru,
2018). Consequently, the professionals employed therein are required to
keep pace with both its technological developments and the specific
demands of the market to gain and retain their employability. As the
data scientist is a central figure in this context, these transformations are
intrinsically linked to this professional role, and the real-time identifi­
cation of market demands is essential in balancing the adequate supply
and demand of talent in the digital renaissance.
The present study aimed to gain insight into the current expectations
of employers seeking to hire data scientists and systematically achieved
this by harvesting and analysing relevant data from job advertisements
published on US job search websites. In this process, the salient skills,
experiences, and qualifications sought by employers for this role were
identified (Wheatley, 2018).
In this respect, three emerging implications and their respective
debates concerning the employability of data scientists will be
addressed. These are (1) averting a skills gap in a rapidly evolving
domain; (2) the alignment between employers and academia; and (3)
the importance of employability for data scientists.
Firstly, the importance of skills-gap management in the digital re­
naissance concerns stakeholders at all levels, from the national to the
individual, that is essential to avoid talent mismatches in the workforce
(Badillo-Amador & Vila, 2013; Park & Arce, 2020). This implies that
countries need to adopt data-driven education policies to avoid creating
a gap between the skills acquired by young people and those needed by
the rapidly changing world of work (Hodder et al., 2018; Holford, 2020).
Thus, continuous monitoring of required skills, as well as a consequent
commitment by stakeholders in the field of education, is crucial and can
only be achieved if the education and labour sectors work together
(Estensoro et al., 2021). In this respect, organisations must articulate
and integrate the identified skill requirements in their recruitment
strategies so as to adequately signal their needs to the market. This can
be achieved by conducting a systematic job analysis that identifies the
skills and competencies required to successfully take on the duties of a
particular job in a specific organisation (Torrington et al., 2020). This
signalling process can then also inform curriculum development in line
with the trajectory of the profession. This type of symbiotic relationship
between educators and employers can ultimately avert the manifesta­
tion of professional skills gaps in their workforce, thus benefiting the
national economy as a whole (Delavande et al., 2020). In sum, to
guarantee the employability of data scientists, an active
multi-stakeholder mapping approach that monitors the needed skillset
for this evolving profession is needed (Aleksynska & Tritah, 2013;
Kupets, 2015, p. 224) and can be achieved in real time by using the
present profiling methodology.
F. Smaldone et al.
Secondly, the alignment between employers and academia must be
fostered so as to implement practical skills mapping as applicable to the
employability construct. As the latter is constantly advancing in theory
and in practice, it is essential that its interpretation develops in parallel
in both domains (de Fruyt et al., 2015; Fugate et al., 2021; Hirsch, 2017;
Hogan et al., 2013; Petrovski et al., 2017). The need arises due to various
issues, including curriculum relevance, timely scholarly insight into
practice, and skills-gap management in the workforce. One way to
bridge this is through the use of this novel type of skills-mapping tool
that has evolved from reviewing generic classifications of hard and soft
skills and competencies (Alamelu et al., 2017; Harris & King, 2015;
Wang et al., 2022; Woya, 2019) to assess more nuanced attributes
relevant to the employability of specific professional figures
(Di Gregorio et al., 2019). This mapping can now be achieved through a
combination of statistics, data analytics, software engineering, and AI
and is particularly relevant for cutting-edge professions in the digital
renaissance. The implications of this evolution include, on the one hand,
that scholarly understanding of the domain through data-driven insights
can be much more timely, and, on the other hand, that organisations can
strategically craft a talent pool that matches their specific needs.
For academia, there are two aspects to address. On the one hand, it is
important that scholarly research has tools that can capture a rapidly
evolving domain and thus develop insights and theories. On the other
hand, it concerns curriculum and teaching. In the first instance, timely
engagement with a developing domain is valuable for investigative
purposes. In the second, a debate regarding the reactivity of the edu­
cation system must be confronted. This concerns the long-standing
debate of education for employment vs. education for education’s sake
(Wright, 2014), which reflects the practical and philosophical rationale
for why and how people should be educated. While education for edu­
cation’s sake maintains that education can contribute to the holistic
development of individuals who will be of value to society in ways that
transcend their professions, the education-for-employment perspective
takes a much more pragmatic stance. The latter is particularly relevant
in the USA, the site of this study, where there has been a concrete push
over the past decades to align the national education policy with the
principles underpinning human-capital theory (Fitzsimons, 2017) and
where, “in a simple equation, the more and better education individuals
possess, the better their returns in financial rewards and the better the
national economy flourishes” (Gillies, 2015, p. 1053). Nevertheless,
despite there being changes in the market, the literature echoes a gen­
eral consensus that these do not warrant highly reactive shifts in uni­
versity curricula, as the essence of fundamental skills and competences
required by employers remains consistent (Di Gregorio et al., 2019;
McCabe et al., 2021).
In summary, to reconcile different perspectives on education and
optimise the stakeholders’ priorities with regard to the development and
employment of talented data scientists, the findings of this study can
contribute to crafting a practicable trajectory for the well-rounded
professionals of the future. The rationale for this would be to take a
data-driven predictive approach to the profession, which could poten­
tially concretely inform curriculum development while embedding the
philosophy of learning to learn for the purpose of allowing data science
professionals to actively develop an intuitive capacity to engage in
lifelong learning that can be applied in tandem with developing tech­
nologies. Thus, it is argued that, while rash decisions to change curric­
ulum design may be problematic, the systematic understanding of
technological shifts can, in any case, enable educators to provide rele­
vant supplementary material or recommend specific elective courses to
integrate the students’ learning, thus directly supporting their
employability.
For organisations, this mapping can act as a decision-support system
for HR management, allowing for the optimisation and streamlining of
strategic processes. This approach is capable of generating a detailed
talent pool of professionals who have been classified via the use of
digital tools and could be shortlisted for recruitment through
681
European Management Journal 40 (2022) 671–684
semi-automatic selection processes by way of defined thresholds in the
analysed values (Davenport & Patil, 2012). This mapping instrument
can thus help identify key parameters for HR decision-making
(Winkler et al., 2013), support the reduction of cost-per-hire in the
staffing process (Armstrong & Taylor, 2020), and avoid the need for
recruitment-process outsourcing (RPO) (Claus Wehner et al., 2015).
Thirdly, the importance of employability to data scientists is critical
to an individual’s chances of being hired and thriving in an organisation.
This has direct implications for their career opportunities, as well as for
the possibility of earning a sound income to support a good lifestyle
balance (Hall & Las Heras, 2010). The relevance of the present
skills-mapping approach can be useful on this level, as it presents an easy
means of monitoring the demands of the employment market in real
time, and thus strategically upskilling oneself to increase one’s personal
opportunities for optimal employment. In the US context, this has
particularly important implications for graduates who have student debt
to pay off. In 2016, undergraduate completers had average cumulative
debts of up to $44,600, which is exponentially higher than in other parts
of the world (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). There is
thus a great need for return on investment (ROI) for students to cover the
elevated costs of pursuing higher education (Cappelli, 2020), conse­
quently promoting the necessity of commodifying their work
(Alaref et al., 2020).
A further potential application of this mapping approach is in the
sphere of strategic employer branding, or “the positioning of the orga­
nization as an ‘employer brand’ to attract and retain the best prospective
employees” (Russell & Brannan, 2016, p. 114). As it is now possible to
systematically map how rival organisations frame their talent-attraction
strategies, it is also viable to craft data-driven campaigns that support
growth, brand reputation, and brand recognition to increase visibility
and loyalty among internal and external stakeholders (Ho & Hung,
2008). As such, digital marketing management strategies aim to increase
the engagement among organisations, citizens, and higher education in­
stitutions, especially considering the new virtual environments, such as
the metaverse, that could promote or affect employees’
self-empowerment (Maden-Eyiusta & Alten, 2021; Marino & Lo Presti,
2018a; Marino & Lo Presti, 2018b; Marino & Lo Presti, 2018c; Statho­
poulou et al., 2019; Tapia & Turner, 2018).
The principal limitations of this study were the size and significance
of the sample. Ideally, it would have engaged with a larger population
and repeated the data collection at time intervals. The scope for future
research includes the evaluation of the use of the semi-automatic anal­
ysis of resources, with a decision based on the threshold values obtained
with the parameters on a larger and more significant sample of job ad­
vertisements, repeated at time intervals, and perhaps including different
global contexts. A theoretical critique could include the reservations
with regard to the use of employability as a tool for skills evaluation
(Crisp & Powell, 2017). Nevertheless, in line with Fugate et al. (2021), it
is argued that the results of this study would underpin the validity of the
employability construct.
In summary, the role of the data scientist is becoming increasingly
valuable in an array of fields in the global labour market. Nevertheless,
this rapidly evolving profession is situated in the intersections among
technological development, the concrete needs of a data-dependent
market and the requirement for a highly interdisciplinary skillset that
the individual pursuing this career must acquire through education and
experience (Sulbout et al., 2022). This complex constellation of vari­
ables, as observed from the perspectives of different related stake­
holders, creates an intricate scenario in which mismatches between the
supply and demand of needed talent are not unexpected. To obtain a
more systematic insight into current labour-market expectations, this
study aimed to capture the characteristics desired by recruiting orga­
nisations as signalled through their job advertisements. The contribu­
tions of this study include the proposal of a novel and systematic
pathway to permit strategic matching between talent supply and de­
mand for the data science profession, providing a scope for a more
F. Smaldone et al. European Management Journal 40 (2022) 671–684

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