Connecticut uses IT to match jobs with students seeking new skills

July 8, 2008 (Computerworld) A new data analysis software system in Connecticut scours online job listings to help colleges prepare students for the job market by teaching them skills that are in demand.

The project uses a customized Web crawler that scours the Internet for online job listings in the state's financial services and insurance industries, then sends that information to be analyzed by specialized software built for the effort. Ultimately, the job listing data is passed on to local colleges universities, which use it in curriculum development to ensure that students are learning the skills that companies are seeking.

Using a portion of a $2.7 million U.S. Department of Labor training grant, Connecticut created a program that is seen as a model for other states around the nation, said Henning Seip, president and co-founder of SkillProof Inc., a Bridgeport, Conn.-based labor research organization that has helped put the project together.

"The problem that exists today, basically across the U.S., is that there are tens of thousands of job boards and millions of job listings online, but no one knows what skills are needed," Seip said. Several years ago, his company began using a Web crawler to scan for job advertisements to determine what skills were needed by employers.

"We tracked job openings for large employers and saw jobs grow, so we helped create a jobs skills listing for Pace University of New York at that time," Seip said.

As part of the project, SkillProof combined its Web crawling technology with data analytics software developed by IBM, Pace and SkillProof.

"It allows us to see what employers are looking for, so schools can see what skills are needed in curriculums," Seip said.

Critical to the effort was the availability of IBM's open standards-based Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), which combines intelligent search, taxonomy generation and classification for more accurate text searches based on natural language, according to the participants in the initiative. Pace's Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems helped to create the application that analyzes the job listing data picked up by the SkillProof Web crawler.

The software proved its worth quickly, by determining that there were a large number of high-paying jobs for insurance actuaries in Connecticut, based on the number of unfilled job postings. Actuaries are insurance company mathematicians who calculate premiums, dividends and annuity rates, while analyzing the potential for future claims costs, according to the participants in the initiative. The mean income for actuaries in Connecticut was $98,550 in 2007, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"This was one of the things the state immediately picked up on, and they started to work with the local college to address that," Seip said. "For the first time, we have hard data when it comes to skill requirements that can be put on the table when colleges and universities make decisions on their curriculums. Usually there is no hard data when they are doing that."