Solutions for Labor Market Analysts

Online job postings have shown promise as a source of real-time advertised demand analysis for more than a decade. But the potential could not be fully realized because conventional technologies can’t extract more than the most basic data elements from free-text postings, such as O*NET and NAICS codes and those fields most easily retrieved from data lists or with fixed, hard-coded rules (e.g. job titles, locations, employer names).

Burning Glass addresses this gap by delivering web-based analytical solutions that leverage the power of artificial intelligence for effective text mining and coding. Our patented approach to parsing and data extraction enables us to mine the text of each job posting to create a significantly expanded data record. In total, our technology can extract, derive, and infer more than 70 data elements from any given free-text job listing. When this technology is applied to a database of more than seven million online job openings updated daily from over 15,000 job boards, newspapers, and employer sites, the result is the most comprehensive, detailed, and actionable repository of real-time demand data in the industry today.

What’s more, our solutions help you grow your advertising revenues and generate new revenue flows by promoting jobs to passive candidates, suggesting hidden talent for your advertisers, driving database search subscriptions, and targeting banner ads.

Our web-based Labor/Insight™ analytical tool helps you understand and respond to current conditions and emerging trends in the labor market by giving you access to these data points and more:

Current Conditions & Trends

• Occupations in greatest demand, overall or by education level, salary level, etc.
• Employers with greatest numbers of advertised job openings in a specified area or for a specified skill, credential, or industry
• Openings by education and experience
• Openings by education and salary
• Skills in demand in a specified industry
• Changes in regional industry and occupation distributions

Emerging Industries and Occupations (e.g. Green)

• Green jobs as a percentage of total job openings
• Occupations with the highest concentration of green skills
• Distribution of green jobs by green sub-cluster
• Green jobs by sub-cluster
• Green and non-green skills and certificates in demand for green jobs
• Employers with green jobs
• High school diploma and sub-BA jobs with highest concentration of green jobs
• Average stated salaries based on education level for green and non-green jobs
• Educational requirements by green skill sub-cluster
• Green and non-green certificate requirements for green jobs
• Experience required for green and non-green jobs
• Salary differences between green & non-green jobs

It’s not just the labor market which has changed so dramatically since BLS first started reporting on market conditions in 1884, but also technology. Over the years, BLS has incorporated advanced technology and continued to add new data sources and analytics, including JOLTS, BED counts, and the Current Population Survey – with many changes in this past decade alone. But one thing hasn’t changed: BLS continues to rely significantly on surveys, reports, and the census for data collection. These are effective methods for ensuring statistical validity but they do have drawbacks, including cost (surveys are expensive), freshness of data (BLS data series can take many months – or more – to be published), and level of detail (reporting is typically generalized at the O*NET or NAICS code level, with limited insight into specific jobs, skills, or qualifications).

Burning Glass has the data and technology to complement BLS reports and fill the gap. Using “spidering” technology to collect online postings, our solutions stay current with changes in the job market on a daily, not monthly, basis. And there’s an added benefit: unlike other job aggregators, whose reporting of online activity is limited to industries and occupations, Burning Glass leverages advanced text mining techniques to analyze and code market activity in granular detail, covering the education, experience, skills, and knowledge in demand as well as the more generic, top level categories. Our Labor/Insight™ web-based market analysis solution:

Keeps your finger on the pulse of the job market – By collecting and publishing data daily, our solutions give you the opportunity to monitor conditions every day and to observe trends as soon as they happen. Used in conjunction with BLS data, our solutions allow you to keep your eye on specific conditions and to identify changes as soon as they happen.

Understands the content of demand at a uniquely granular level – Online job ads are a rich source of information on the skills and other qualifications actually required by employers. Leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, Burning Glass reads, understands, and extracts more than 70 data elements from any given posting, giving you the ability to track a specific data point (e.g. a particular technical certification) across industries, occupations, salaries, etc. or to investigate the relationship among several data (e.g. education level and salary) within a given industry or occupation.

Understands what and where specific qualifications are in demand – The demand for specific skills, certifications, and other qualifications is not identical across an entire state; depending on the businesses based in a given city or region, employer demand for specific credentials can vary widely. Our solutions help you pinpoint demand to a state, county, LMA, MSA, or town. In similar fashion, you can use our solution to generate a list of employers with the greatest demand for a specific qualification and if desired, view actual job postings by relevant category.

Provides actionable intelligence to guide workforce training and education – The efficacy of a job training program is measured based not only on personal attainment of new skills and knowledge, but also on their relevancy. Our solutions help you to target training based on the skills currently in demand in your state or region in order to ensure that completers are rewarded with positive employment outcomes instead of just a nicely framed certificate.

Keeping tabs on emerging industries and technologies in an extremely dynamic labor market is difficult. Making sound decisions that fully realize the associated opportunities for employment and training is truly a challenge, especially in the absence of detailed, up to the minute information.

Take, for instance, the emerging green economy. It’s evolving quickly, with considerable ongoing change in terms of the types of opportunities available, the sub-sectors exhibiting the greatest demand, and the specific skills, experiences, and other qualifications required of job seekers. Its scope is broad and includes many different occupations, each with thousands of job openings – some of them green and some of them not yet green at all. Occupations are greening at different rates and the specific requirements of green opportunities should not be assumed to be identical to those of the broader pool of jobs in any given occupation.

To understand and take action in the green economy, analysts need a way to discern where the green jobs are today from among the broader pool of jobs in any given occupation. They also need help cataloging the skills, education, and other requirements associated with each occupation. Conventional tools provide data at the industry and occupational levels only, drawing no distinction between green and non-green skills or work activities within any given occupation. At best, these tools infer skills based upon static O*NET-based tables – even though O*NET codes can include a wide dispersion of work activities and required knowledge base. As a result, absent an awareness of the specific nature of each opportunity, these tools provide little help in identifying specific training, education, or other enabling career steps.

Burning Glass is different. To continue with the example of the green economy, our Labor/Insight™ market analysis solution helps you:

Understand the industries and technologies that are emerging and the workforce needs they impose – The application of advanced text mining tools to the analysis of the millions of job listings posted online daily provides more than just real-time tracking of the green labor market. Just as importantly, it also delivers actionable intelligence on the particular skills, certifications, degrees, and experiences in demand across a range of occupations and on the very nature of emerging sectors (whether in the green economy, advanced manufacture, IT, healthcare technology or others), helping you observe and respond to developments and corrections as they happen rather than after the fact.

Develop a workforce that has the skills and other qualifications to support and benefit from emerging industries and technologies – By flagging those jobs that specifically indicate green skills, tools, or technologies as distinct from others in the same occupational codes, our solutions provide you with a real-time picture of the specific skills needed to win placement in targeted green jobs. This intelligence is essential when investing in training that will lead to career-path employment.

Separate fact from fiction – Too often, the perception is that the path to green employment requires extensive green training when, in fact, conventional skills may be more important (e.g. solar panel installation has more to do with general electrical and construction skills than with specific knowledge of photovoltaic cells). By tracking both green and non-green skill requirements for green jobs, our solutions help you determine when a slight modification to an existing training program represents the best and most cost-effective strategy for preparing job seekers for green opportunities.