Salience and Market-aware Skill Extraction for Job Targeting

At LinkedIn, we want to create economic opportunity for everyone in the global workforce. To make this happen, LinkedIn offers a reactive Job Search system, and a proactive Jobs You May Be Interested In (JYMBII) system to match the best candidates with their dream jobs. One of the most challenging tasks for developing these systems is to properly extract important skill entities from job postings and then target members with matched attributes. In this work, we show that the commonly used text-based \emph{salience and market-agnostic} skill extraction approach is sub-optimal because it only considers skill mention and ignores the salient level of a skill and its market dynamics, i.e., the market supply and demand influence on the importance of skills. To address the above drawbacks, we present \model, our deployed \emph{salience and market-aware} skill extraction system. The proposed \model ~shows promising results in improving the online performance of job recommendation (JYMBII) ($+1.92\%$ job apply) and skill suggestions for job posters ($-37\%$ suggestion rejection rate). Lastly, we present case studies to show interesting insights that contrast traditional skill recognition method and the proposed \model~from occupation, industry, country, and individual skill levels. Based on the above promising results, we deployed the \model ~online to extract job targeting skills for all $20$M job postings served at LinkedIn.Comment: 9 pages, to appear in KDD202

East Midlands FRESA targets project

Reviewed employment and skills targets in use by organisations in the East Midlands in order to inform the development of targets for the East Midlands Framework for Employment and Skills action (FRESA). Established target development process later adopted by emda for 2006 RES. Developed criteria for applying to future selection of economic performance monitoring metrics - especially for skills, based on extant best practice, such as the Treasury's 'Green Book'

Getting The Best Of Us: Multinational Corporate Networks And The Diffusion Of Skill-Selective Immigration Policies

Populist backlash has emerged as an alarming trend shaping immigration policy across the developed world in recent years. At the same time, a less-sensationalized pattern has appeared in the form of policies designed to attract the highly skilled. In the face of so much anti-immigration sentiment, how can we understand this push for global talent? One possibility is that these seemingly divergent agenda are but two sides of the same coin. Policymakers and members of the business community point to labor shortages and a global war for talent as justifications for skill-selective policies. Yet some in the academic community contest that the evidence for these concerns is lacking. This gives rise to a two-pronged question. Is there really a competition between states? And how can we understand the role of corporations in advancing the international mobility of the highly skilled? This dissertation offers a theory of the multinational corporation (MNC) as the instrument of international policy diffusion. It explores the preferences and incentives that shape the behaviors of individuals, policymakers and firms and demonstrates that there is a window of political space within which firms have an opportunity to advance a skill-selective compromise. To test this theory, two original datasets are introduced, the first tracking policies targeting highly skilled migrants from 1980-2017 and the second following the expansion of MNC subsidiary locations over time. Using spatial regression analysis and case study evidence, this project finds considerable support for the idea that MNCs act as agents of international policy diffusion with regard to skill-selective immigration policies. The major contribution of this dissertation is its contention that the geographic structure of the multinational firm alters the firm’s strategic incentives and political activity, making it organizationally unique from the single-nation firm and connecting MNC incentives with policy diffusion

Self-Identification From The Professional And Social Perspectives Of Flight

The development of one’s identity is connected to the level of effort willing to be committed to goal achievement. Per Velleman (2006), what someone cares about, determines what they must do for survival (p.336). While identity has been dissected, the applicability of connection for social and professional ties within aviation has not been thoroughly processed. General aviation flying and that of airline pilots has been compared regarding skill and safety association, but not in identity construction. A population of airline pilots was researched, that may or may not have been actively participating GA, with attempt to establish factor recognition of identity formation via quantitative survey, and qualitative, open-ended interviews. The objective was to uncover whether a social identity in GA impacts a professional identity for airline pilots, opening doors for growth in both piloting realms. Themes were expected to emerge regarding primacy, background, and currency, that were directed by initial survey findings. Actual themes deduced through coding of qualitative interviews connected to the quantitative phase, but emphasized more strongly points of primacy, self-credibility/worth, attachment, community, and commitment

Dislocated Worker Training and Education Perceptions: The Effect of Tailored Information, Self-Concept, and Role Salience on Self-Reported Deterrents to Education Participation

This study investigated whether selected information would change dislocated workers\u27 deterrents to education participation. The study also explored whether information presentation method altered the participants\u27 perceived deterrents. Finally, the study explored whether self-concept or role salience as a student moderated information reception. The population included North Carolina workers pending job dislocation from three manufacturing plants. The final analysis included results from 194 workers. Participants were randomly assigned to groups using a roster having random group assignments and case numbers. A three-group, quasi-experimental design explored changes in education deterrents. Three instruments provided data: the Adult Learning Questionnaire, Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, Second Edition, and Salience Inventory. Treatment materials included eight brochures written below a 5th-grade reading level, and a video presenting the same information. Topics included job loss grief, employment barriers, job search assistance, income support, upgrading skills, health care, transportation, and childcare. Data from two Adult Learning Questionnaire administrations were used for factor analysis. These results were compared to evaluate hypothesis H1: Delivery of dislocated worker supporting services information will change the deterrent factor structure, indicating changed perceptions of deterrents to education participation. The factor structure changed from pretest to posttest; hypothesis H1 was accepted. Data from the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, Second Edition, and Salience Inventory was used for comparisons of group differences. These tests evaluated the second and third hypotheses: H2: Dislocated workers who receive verbal information combined with written information will report significantly more changes on the Adult Learning Questionnaire than either the written-information or the no-information groups when the effect of self-concept is held constant; and H3: Dislocated workers who receive verbal information combined with written information will report significantly more changes on the Adult Learning Questionnaire than either the written-information or the no-information groups when the effect of salience as a student is held constant. The analyses of covariance were not significant; Hypotheses H2 and H3 were rejected. This study identified education deterrent factors reported by dislocated workers. Further, with a population reporting lower educational attainment and family income, this study replicated studies. Additionally, the study provided a prototype of materials designed expressly for low-literate dislocated workers

Grounding event references in news

Events are frequently discussed in natural language, and their accurate identification is central to language understanding. Yet they are diverse and complex in ontology and reference; computational processing hence proves challenging. News provides a shared basis for communication by reporting events. We perform several studies into news event reference. One annotation study characterises each news report in terms of its update and topic events, but finds that topic is better consider through explicit references to background events. In this context, we propose the event linking task which—analogous to named entity linking or disambiguation—models the grounding of references to notable events. It defines the disambiguation of an event reference as a link to the archival article that first reports it. When two references are linked to the same article, they need not be references to the same event. Event linking hopes to provide an intuitive approximation to coreference, erring on the side of over-generation in contrast with the literature. The task is also distinguished in considering event references from multiple perspectives over time. We diagnostically evaluate the task by first linking references to past, newsworthy events in news and opinion pieces to an archive of the Sydney Morning Herald. The intensive annotation results in only a small corpus of 229 distinct links. However, we observe that a number of hyperlinks targeting online news correspond to event links. We thus acquire two large corpora of hyperlinks at very low cost. From these we learn weights for temporal and term overlap features in a retrieval system. These noisy data lead to significant performance gains over a bag-of-words baseline. While our initial system can accurately predict many event links, most will require deep linguistic processing for their disambiguation

Qualitative assessment of the DYNAMIX policy mixes

This report builds on the findings of the qualitative ex-ante assessment s of the policy mixes developed under the DYNAMIX project1. In doing so, it identifies some of the challenges associated with the forward-looking evaluation of policy mixes generally, and with the specific policy mixes identified by the DYNAMIX project. It also notes key areas of consonance and divergence between the qualitative ex ante assessments under consideration, and the quantitative ex-ante assessments carried out in parallel, and identifies possible implications for policy. The report first explains the methodology adopted for each aspect of the qualitative ex-ante assessment; it then discusses some of the challenges which were common to all or several of the assessments, or which arise from the process of bringing separate assessments together to form a single overview. Understanding these challenges, and thus the nature of the messages that emerge from the evaluations (both in terms of the valuable light they provide, and in terms of their limitations) is important to their effective use in policymaking. Moreover, some of the challenges of the evaluations themselves reflect the challenges faced by policymakers in developing responses at the scale required to deliver a significant shift towards improved resource efficiency in the European economy. This report then addresses the comparison with the quantitative assessment carried out in parallel under the DYNAMIX project, looking at both the economic modelling and the physical and environmental modelling, and respectively comparing them with the economic and the environmental qualitative assessments. This report does not aim to recapitulate the detailed findings of the individual qualitative assessments, which are summarised in Annex 1. Rather, it attempts to identify some key messages which emerge from the process of bringing together separate qualitative assessments which address different facets of the impacts of policy mixes, using different methodological approaches; a process which was informed by the comparison with the results emerging from the quantitative assessment. These messages appear to be of broad relevance to the development of policy mixes for resource efficiency. In particular, we identify: \u2022 The importance of understanding public acceptability issues, and the potential for policy sequencing to be used to help achieve the required changes in paradigms over time; \u2022 The challenges involved in developing appropriate, and effective, tax instruments , which requires attention to the risk of overlaps between tax instruments, and is confronted with a broad challenge of public acceptability; \u2022 The need to address the impact of extra - EU material flows in the form of imports and exports , both in terms of the potential impacts (often exaggerated in the public discourse) on EU economic interests, and in terms of the impact of EU policies on environmental and other outcomes in other economies; \u2022 The importance of addressing social impacts at an early stage in policy design, in order to ensure that accompanying measures reinforce and facilitate the shift to resource efficiency among low - income households in particular. \u2022 The need for coherence and consistency in the development of policy mixes , based on forward - looking roadmapping, effective sequencing , and an awareness of the challenges posed by uncertainty (both uncertainty in relation to the impact of individual policies, and uncertainty as to the broader context in which policies will be implemented)

E-government iImplementation and adoption: the case study of Botswana Government

ABSTRACT The advancements in the ICT and internet technologies challenge governments to engage in the electronic transformation of public services and information provision to citizens. The capability to reach citizens in the physical world via e-government platform and render a citizen-centric public sector has increasingly become vital. Thus, spending more resources to promote and ensure that all members of society are included in the entire spectrum of information society and more actively access government online is a critical aspect in establishing a successful e-government project. Every e-government programme requires a clear idea of the proposed benefits to citizens, the challenges to overcome and the level of institutional reform that has to take place for e- government to be a success in a given context. E-government strategy is fundamental to transforming and modernising the public sector through identification of key influential elements or strategy factors and ways of interacting with citizens. It is therefore apparent that governments must first understand variables that influence citizens’ adoption of e-government in order to take them into account when developing and delivering services online. Botswana has recently embarked on e-government implementation initiatives that started with the e-readiness assessment conducted in 2004, followed by enactment of the National ICT policy of 2007 and the approval of the e-government strategy approved in 2012 for dedicated implementation in the 2014 financial year. Significant developments have taken place around national and international connectivity including initiatives that offer connectivity to citizens such as the I- partnership, community run Nteletsa projects, post office run tele-centres and Sesigo projects that have been deployed on a wider Botswana. In spite of these remarkable initiatives there is no change management strategy in place and evidence to suggest that citizens cluster groups, government employees, key influential citizens’ stakeholders and other local government administrative governing structures at district levels have been appropriately informed, consulted, engaged and participated in the design, development and implementation initiatives. This position has contributed largely to low e-readiness indices for Botswana, low PC, Internet and broadband penetration levels, which do not commensurate with levels of connectivity initiatives already in place and operational. The strategy development, which is the viability business plan for the entire project has been initiated and concluded without the appropriate input of citizens, employees and local government structures at the districts. Considering that that e-government is new and narrowly researched in Botswana. There is non existing research on both the impact of strategy factors to e-government implementation success and citizens’ involvement and participation in the e-government design and implementation through to adoption and continual use. This study therefore explores and investigates empirically the key e-government strategy influential success elements and the how citizens’ involvement and participation in e-government development can be secured, supported and facilitated towards adoption and continual future use. This culminates in the proposal of both theoretically supported and empirically validated e-government strategy framework and citizen centric conceptual model. The study is crucial as it aims understand how can influences upon success in e-government project be better understood and citizens’ stakeholder adoption of e-government enhanced to facilitate successful development of e-government in Botswana and is also timely as it comes at the time when Botswana has not yet implemented her e-government strategy, hence factors identified are critical to both strategy re-alignment and design of the citizens’ involvement and participation change management strategy to support both implementation and citizens’ adoption of e-government in Botswana. The study utilises the mixed methods research, employing both qualitative and quantitative methods to address the research question and triangulated data collection approaches used to select survey sample for two questionnaire sets carried on opinion holders within government and non government structures and ordinary citizens, use of observations on operating tele-centres, interviews with key e-government strategic stakeholders and document analysis which included e-government policies and related documentations as well as extensive review of e-government published literature including applied implementation and citizens adoption experiences of developing and developed countries. In the analysis of data the multiple regression analysis has been utilised and multivariate analysis performed to ensure linearity, normality and collinearity. The linear regression has been used to test the hypothesis through the Analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique. Keywords E-government, strategy critical success factors, key influential elements, citizen centric conceptual model, strategy framework, Botswana.Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST)Botswana Embass