These adverts are a rich source of labour market information; they allow us to quickly detect changes in the skills demanded by employers, and explore how skill demands vary by geography, occupation and industry. Information on skill demands is not available from official vacancy statistics, and the need for timely and high-quality intelligence about skills has been heightened due to the labour market disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Learn more about the Observatory and see the latest insights.

All the aggregate data series can be downloaded from Github. We aim to update the data on a monthly basis. Unfortunately we are unable to share the job adverts that we have collected.

Following the Government’s announcement to support the creation of two million green jobs by 2030, we have used the Open Jobs Observatory to develop a preliminary methodology for detecting green job adverts. Developing the capacity to spot jobs in green sectors, and examining how these jobs are spread across the UK, is critical for helping workers to transition into these roles. Our findings are presented in this article, while the complete methodology for identifying jobs in green sectors is presented in this technical write-up. The code is available on Github. Given Nesta’s commitment to creating a Sustainable Future, we will continue to evolve our methodology for detecting green jobs.

A secondary aim of the Observatory is to develop open methodologies for extracting key information from job adverts, such as skills. Currently, there are very few such technical resources available. To contribute towards an open standard, we have released our codebase which consists of algorithms for extracting locations, salaries, skills and occupations (SOC codes) from job adverts. It is free to use, under an MIT license. This slide deck provides a technical overview of our methodology.

We have also written in-depth articles that walk through our three principal algorithms:

• Extracting skills
• Assigning jobs to occupations
• Identifying the locations of jobs

The Observatory is a pilot project and we welcome your feedback and suggestions for future improvements. We are also seeking funding to keep the Observatory running. If you have suggestions or are interested in supporting the work of the Observatory, please reach out to us by emailing [email protected].