Contribution
Description: Central purpose of the paper is to distinguish between common qualification patterns and job requirement of different academic occupational groups detected in job advertisements in German newspapers and to elucidate the changes and modifications in the demanded qualifications patterns over the last 55 years. In this comprehensive empirical study which is based upon the filter- or rather screening theory (e.g. ARROW) it is clearly proven that job advertisements reflect accurately changes in the economic climate as well as in the academic labour market situation. Besides contribution to this field by L.ALEX and R.WERNER it was my goal to start a comparative analysis which focuses on the structure and content of job advertisements and also to unfold differences between the qualification patterns of groups of academic graduates who are addressed in the advertisements.
The results allow to forecast possible developments in the field of the qualification research and provide objective evidence of the economic dependency between the content and structure of recruitment advertising on the one hand and the economic climate on the other hand. This paper would like to indicate the educational necessity of analysing job ads in order to (re-)structure "fields of studies" in a way that it will meet the demands of a changing professional world.
Methodology: In consideration of the following academic occupational groups: graduates in business administration, graduates in engineering, graduates in educational science, graduates in psychology, I drew relevant samples out of the appointments sections of national daily newspapers from the years 1950 to 2005 (steps of 5 years) in order to identify mentionable variations in the job descriptions and required qualifications. Additionally I compared the year 1999 with the year 2004 because one could detect that these two periods stand exemplary for complete contrary economic climates and so therefore job advertisements differentiated not only qualitatively (content) but also high in numbers. After sampling there were altogether approximately 30.000 relevant ads to be analysed.
I developed 42 variables/categories in SPSS in order to reflect the structure of the advertisements. Variables e.g.: job title, the addressed academical group and demanded field of study, employer (name of the company or personnel consultancy), demanded work experience. I made a frequency analysis of all relevant variables and also developed crosstabs between certain variables to show possible effects (e.g. correlation, chi-square test).
The other part of my research dealt with about 17.000 qualification profiles drawn from the job advertisement. With the content analysis program COAN it was possible to illustrate the word frequencies and TTRs (Type-Token-Ratios) of the rtf-files in regard to different years, newspapers and addressed academical groups. As a last step I could integrate the results in SPSS again.
Conclusions: For example (no details). The economic climate quantitatively as also qualitatively effects the structure and content of demanded qualification patterns. The absolute number of job advertisements is relatively smaller in a time of an economic downturn compared to a time of cyclical upturn. Beyond that I could detect that the demanded qualifications do also qualitatively differentiate in the focused periods. For example I discovered that in times of economical downturn the professional competence of an applicant has a certain significance in the ads, contrariwise "soft skills" are gaining a dominating position within the qualification patterns in "booming times". But the ads vary also when focusing the different academic occupational groups. For example the number of ads seeking for graduates in engineering is in the first five periods disproportional large. One could also discover that the level of specification of the job requirements / job descriptions are more detailed listed for graduates in business administration and engineering in comparison to all the other academic graduates.
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