Institutions Start Scanning Help-Wanted Postings

Higher education institutions have found a new way to more accurately determine which types of workers are in high demand in the labor market before their academic programs become obsolete. Artificial-intelligence spiders crawl through the depths of the web and analyze massive numbers of online job advertisements in a short amount of time.

Recently adopted by some U.S. colleges and universities, this technique allows administrators to quickly review the relevance of programming at their institution, and to make any necessary changes, additions or eliminations. This guidance ensures credentials remain relevant to students and their prospective employers upon graduation.

Many higher education institutions rely on outdated labor statistics from the federal government to set the direction of their workforce-focused programming, according to CNN Money.

“It’s like looking in the rearview mirror,” John Dorrer, program director at Jobs for the Future, told CNN Money. “We’re training people for jobs that don’t exist, and not training people for jobs that do.”

“Schools that can make sure their graduates do well are seeing a meteoric rise in their standing,” Matthew Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, a company that provides institutions with these crawling services, told CNN Money. He went on to say that the higher education institutions that can quickly adapt to the changing demands of the workforce will be better off than those who churn out graduates and leave them struggling to find work in their fields.