Open Data Analytics

At Findwise we regularly have companywide hackathons with different themes. The latest theme was insights in open data, which I personally find very interesting.

Our group chose to fetch data from the Arbetsförmedlingen (Swedish Employment Agency), where ten years of job ads are available. There are about 4 million job ads in total during this time-period, so there is some material to analyze.

To make it easier to enable ad hoc analysis, we started off by extracting competences and personal traits mentioned in the job ads. This would allow us to spot trends in competences over time, in different regions or correlate competences and trait. Lots of possibilities.

Personal qualities and IT competences

As an IT-ninja I find it more exciting to focus on jobs, competences and traits within the IT industry. A lot is happening, and it is easy for me to relate to this area, of course. A report from Almega suggests that there is a huge demand of competences within IT for the coming years and it brings up a lot of examples of lacking technical skills. What is rarely addressed is what personality types are connected to these specific competences. We’re able to answer this interesting question from our data:

What personal traits are common complementary to the competences that are in demand?

Figure 1 – Relevant worktitles, competences and traits for the search term “big data”

The most wanted personal traits are in general “Social, driven, passionate, communicative”. All these results should of course be taken with a grain of salt, since a few staffing/general IT consulting companies are a big part of the number of job ads within IT. But we can also look at a single competence and answer the question:

What traits are more common with this competence than in general? (Making the question a bit more specific.)

Some examples of competences in demand are system architecture, support and JavaScript. The most outstanding traits for system architecture are sharp, quality orientated and experienced. It can always be discussed if experienced is a trait (although our model thoughts so) but it makes sense in any case since system architecture tend to be more common among senior roles. For support we find traits such as service orientated, happy and nice, which is not unexpected, Lastly, for job-ads needing javascript-competence, personal traits such as quality orientated, quality aware and creative are the most predominant.

Differences between Stockholm and Gothenburg

Or let’s have a look at geographical differences between Sweden’s two largest cities when it comes to personal qualities in IT-job ads. In Gothenburg there is a stronger correlation to the traits spontaneous, flexible and curious while Stockholm correlates with traits such as sharp, pragmatic and delivery-focused.

What is best suitable for your personality?

You could also look at it the other way around and start with the personal traits to see which jobs/competences are meant for you. If you are analytical then jobs as controller or accountant could be jobs for you. If you are an optimist, then job coach or guidance counselors seems to be a good fit. We created a small application where you can type in competences or personal traits and get suggested jobs in this way. Try it out here!

Lear more about Open Data Analytics

In addition, we’re hosting a breakfast seminar December 12^th where we’ll use the open data from Arbetsförmedlingen to show a process of how to make more data driven decisions. More information and registration (the seminar will be held in Swedish)

Author: Henrik Alburg, Data Scientist

To understand the topics that actually are important to different political parties is a difficult task. Can text analytics together with an search index be an approach to given a better understanding?

This blog post describes how IBM Watson Explorer Content Analytics (WCA) can be used to make sense of Swedish politics. All speeches (in Swedish: anföranden) in the Swedish Parliament from 2004 to 2015 are analyzed using WCA. In total 139 110 transcribed text documents were analyzed. The Swedish language support build by Findwise for WCA is used together with a few text analytic processing steps which parses out person names, political party, dates and topics of interest. The selected topics in this analyzed are all related to infrastructure and different types of fuels.

We start by looking at how some of the topics are mentioned over time.

Analyze of terms of interets in Swedsih parlament between 2004 and 2014.

Analyze of terms of interest in Swedish parliament between 2004 and 2014.

The view shows topic which has a higher number of mentions compared to what would be expected during one year. Here we can see among other topics that the topic flygplats (airport) has a high increase in number of mentioning during 2014.

So let’s dive down and see what is being said about the topic flygplats during 2014.

Swedish political parties mentioning Bromma Airport during 2014.

The above image shows how the different political parties are mentioning the topic flygplats during the year 2014. The blue bar shows the number of times the topic flygplats was mentioned by each political party during the year. The green bar shows the WCA correlation value which indicates how strongly related a term is to the current filter. What we can conclude is that party Moderaterna mentioned flygplats during 2014 more frequently than other parties.

Reviewing the most correlated nouns when filtering on flygplats and the year 2014 shows among some other nouns: Bromma (place in Sweden), airport and nedläggning (closing). This gives some idea what was discussed during the period. By filtering on the speeches which was held by Moderaterna and reading some of them makes it clear that Moderaterna is against a closing of Bromma airport.

The text analytics and the index provided by WCA helps us both discover trending topics over time and gives us a tool for understanding who talked about a subject and what was said.

All the different topics about infrastructure can together create a single topic for infrastructure. Speeches that are mentioning tåg (train), bredband (broadband) or any other defined term for infrastructure are also tagged with the topic infrastructure. This wider concept of infrastructure can of course also be viewed over time.

Discussions in Swedish parliament mentioning the defined terms which builds up the subject infrastructure 2004 to 2015.

Another way of finding which party that are most correlated to a subject is by comparing pair of facets. The following table shows parties highly related to terms regarding infrastructure and type of fuels.

Swedish political parties highly correlated to subjects regarding infrastructure and types of fuel.

Let’s start by explain the first row in order to understand the table. Mobilnät (mobile net) has only been mentioned 44 times by Centerpartiet, but Centerpartiet is still highly related to the term with a WCA correlation value of 3.7. This means that Centerpartiet has a higher share of its speeches mentioning mobilnät compared to other parties. The table indicates that two parties Centerpartiet and Miljöpartiet are more involved about the subject infrastructure topics than other political parties.

Swedish parties mentioning the defined concept of infrastructure.

Filtering on the concept infrastructure also shows that Miljöpartiet and Centerpartiet are the two parties which has the highest share of speeches mentioning the defined infrastructure topics.

Interested to dig deeper into the data? Parsing written text with text analytics is a successful approach for increasing an understanding of subjects such as politics. Using IBM Watson Explorer Content Analytics makes it easy. Most of the functionality used in this example is also out of the box functionalities in WCA.

The Findability blog

the enterprise search and findability blog by Tietoevry Findwise

Tag Archives: open-data

Pragmatic or spontaneous – What are the most common personal qualities in IT-job ads?