IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v13y2021i23p12999-d687251.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Requirements for Project Managers—What Do Job Advertisements Say?

Author

Listed:
  • Marcin Wyskwarski

    (Faculty of Organization and Management, Institute of Economics and Informatics, Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland)

Abstract

The growing number of projects and the key role of project managers in their implementation makes the competencies of managers a subject of many studies. An attempt can be made to determine the project manager competencies that employers appreciate the most through analyses of job advertisements. Due to a very large number of job advertisements, it may be difficult or even impossible to analyze their content manually. A solution may be to fetch and process job advertisements automatically. The main purpose of this paper was to identify the project manager competencies that are the most desired by employers. An analysis of job advertisements was performed to identify the project manager competencies required by employers. Job advertisements were automatically downloaded from online job boards. Fragments of job advertisements that described requirements were analyzed with text mining. The analysis included preprocessing, building of corpora of documents, construction of document-term matrices, application of traditional data mining methods, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is a popular topic modeling algorithm. After the initial text processing (all characters except letters were removed, uppercase letters were converted to lowercase letters, words deemed useless were removed, and words were converted to their basic form), n-grams were built, and topics identified with LDA were generated. The most frequently used words and n-grams, along with the identified topics, were graphically represented. The meanings of the words and sentences were not analyzed in the text mining analysis of the job advertisements. The analysis did not take into account whether the words appeared side by side in the document-except for the intentional creation of n-grams (such as “communication skill”). The analysis, however, facilitated the identification of certain patterns and regularities in the occurrence of specific strings in the documents (fragments of advertisements describing the requirements). The interpretation of the results is based on the frequency of words and n-grams and frequency of words in topics identified by the LDA algorithm. This paper contributes to science by showing that text mining of job offers can, to some extent, help determine project manager competencies in demand. The method can be used by organizations training future project managers to modify and better adapt curricula to the needs of the labor market. It can be used to monitor the current trends in project manager requirements as well.

Suggested Citation

  • Marcin Wyskwarski, 2021. "Requirements for Project Managers—What Do Job Advertisements Say?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(23), pages 1-16, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:23:p:12999-:d:687251
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/23/12999/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/23/12999/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. João “Eduardo” Varajão & Hélio Silva & Mirjana Pejic-Bach, 2019. "Key Competences of Information Systems Project Managers," International Journal of Information Technology Project Management (IJITPM), IGI Global, vol. 10(3), pages 73-90, July.
    2. Panggih Kusuma Ningrum & Tatdow Pansombut & Attachai Ueranantasun, 2020. "Text mining of online job advertisements to identify direct discrimination during job hunting process: A case study in Indonesia," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(6), pages 1-29, June.
    3. Sabrina Loufrani-Fedida & Stéphanie Missonier, 2015. "The project manager cannot be a hero anymore! Understanding critical competencies in project-based organizations from a multilevel approach," Post-Print halshs-01197156, HAL.
    4. An, Nan & Qiang, Maoshan & Wen, Qi & Jiang, Hanchen & Xia, Bingqing, 2019. "Contribution of project managers’ capability to project ending performance under stressful conditions," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 198-209.
    5. Jian Xue & Zeeshan Rasool & Aqsa Gillani & Ahmad Imran Khan, 2020. "The Impact of Project Manager Soft Competences on Project Sustainability," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(16), pages 1-18, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Baskaran Govindaras & Tuan Sau Wern & Sharangeet Kaur & Idris Akmal Haslin & R Kanesaraj Ramasamy, 2023. "Sustainable Environment to Prevent Burnout and Attrition in Project Management," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(3), pages 1-20, January.
    2. Goerz, Katharina, 2021. "The empowered project manager: Employee perception of empowerment," Journal of Applied Leadership and Management, Hochschule Kempten - University of Applied Sciences, Professional School of Business & Technology, vol. 9, pages 41-60.
    3. Kuhn, Peter & Shen, Kailing & Zhang, Shuo, 2020. "Gender-targeted job ads in the recruitment process: Facts from a Chinese job board," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    4. Bäck, Asta & Hajikhani, Arash & Jäger, Angela & Schubert, Torben & Suominen, Arho, 2022. "Return of the Solow-paradox in AI? AI-adoption and firm productivity," Papers in Innovation Studies 2022/1, Lund University, CIRCLE - Centre for Innovation Research.
    5. Rym Ibrahim & Céline Desmoulins, 2021. "Quand la mise en œuvre d'une créativité collective permet la formation de compétences collectives. Le cas d'un processus de design collaboratif," Post-Print hal-03467094, HAL.
    6. Rabia Bashir & Aymen Sajjad & Shahid Bashir & Khawaja Fawad Latif & Saman Attiq, 2021. "Project Managers’ Competencies in International Development Projects: A Delphi Study," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(4), pages 21582440211, November.
    7. Peter Kuhn & Kailing Shen, 2023. "What Happens When Employers Can No Longer Discriminate in Job Ads?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 113(4), pages 1013-1048, April.
    8. Krzysztof Dziekoñski, 2016. "Application Of Classification Trees For Comparative Analysis Of Construction Project Manager’S Competencies," Polish Journal of Management Studies, Czestochowa Technical University, Department of Management, vol. 14(2), pages 40-50, December.
    9. Muhammad Zeeshan Fareed & Qin Su & Najam Abbas Naqvi & Rida Batool & Muhammad Umer Aslam, 2023. "Transformational Leadership and Project Success: The Moderating Effect of Top Management Support," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(3), pages 21582440231, August.
    10. Lina Cao & Jian Zhang & Xinquan Ge & Jindong Chen, 2021. "Occupational profiling driven by online job advertisements: Taking the data analysis and processing engineering technicians as an example," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(6), pages 1-20, June.
    11. Marek Golinski & Dorota Baczkiewicz, 2021. "Analysis of Factors Influencing the Teamwork Competences of Managers Starting their Professional Career," European Research Studies Journal, European Research Studies Journal, vol. 0(Special 5), pages 64-76.
    12. Meiseberg, Brinja & Perrigot, Rozenn, 2020. "Pricing-based practices, conflicts and performance in franchising," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 38(6), pages 939-955.
    13. Oliver Laasch & Dirk C. Moosmayer & Elena P. Antonacopoulou, 2023. "The Interdisciplinary Responsible Management Competence Framework: An Integrative Review of Ethics, Responsibility, and Sustainability Competences," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 187(4), pages 733-757, November.
    14. Kimberly Scharf & Oleksandr Talavera & Linh Vi, 2023. "Gender Differences in Returns to Beauty," Discussion Papers 23-08, Department of Economics, University of Birmingham.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:23:p:12999-:d:687251. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.