What are the digital skills sought by scientific employers in potential candidates?

ABSTRACT

The growth in digitalisation has led to an increasing demand for digital skills in various job sectors. In particular, employers in scientific job areas have shown interest in candidates possessing digital competencies. This study aims to analyse the digital skill requirements for candidates in scientific job opportunities. The content analysis is based on a dataset comprising 126,360 scientific job advertisements from Science Careers spanning the period from 2019 to 2023. The findings of this study reveal an upward trend in the demand for digital skills. Furthermore, jobs offering higher salaries are more likely to require digital skills compared to jobs offering lower salaries. Notably, skills such as data analysis, statistics, Python, and R demonstrate increasing demand, while other skills such as data collection show a declining trend. These results significantly contribute to our understanding of the impact of digitalisation on the scientific landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Digitalisation
• scientific job
• employability
• research education
• higher education management

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71974029] and the China Scholarship Council [grant numbers 202106060129]. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers and Bart Verspagen for their insightful comments and suggestions.

An earlier version of this study was posted at the Proceedings of the 26^th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators held at Granada, Spain.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2024.2374392

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the China Scholarship Council [202106060129]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [71974029].