Unveiling Disparities: NLP Analysis of Software Industry and Vocational Education Gaps

Paper in proceeding, 2024

The rapid growth of software industry highlights the importance of the education system in producing competent professionals to meet industry demands. Previous research has identified a gap between industry needs and the content of educational programs. This study presents Vocational Education and Labour Market Analyser (VELMA), a tool designed to extract information from job ads and educational curricula (both from Sweden), utilising topic modelling to identify the diverse technologies and skills in demand within the industry and those covered by professional education. Particularly, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to categorise keywords into cohesive themes for document frequency analysis. Our findings highlight industry demand for skills in cloud and embedded technologies, security engineering, and software architecture. In contrast, the Higher Vocational Education (HVE) curricula emphasise the education of web developers and general object-oriented programming languages.