Analysing 1200 Data job ads

03 August 2020

I’ve got a fun little side project going and I’m inviting you along for the journey!

The folks at DataJobs.nl have very kindly agreed to let me analyse all their job ads data. DataJobs is a website that posts data-related job ads for roles based in the Netherlands. Many of the ads are posted in Dutch but don’t worry about that – I know enough Dutch to get us by.

Although the roles are Netherlands-based, I think this data is still extremely relevant no matter where you are located. The Netherlands is quite an advanced economy. It has high-end manufacturing, it’s one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters, it’s home to global consumer brands like Nike and Heineken, tech companies like Booking.com and has many major banks. Further to that, it’s got a large public sector that for the most part have digitised quite well. What I’m saying is – its a large developed economy with a good demand for a range of tech skills.

I’ve had a quick look at the data, and there’s almost 1200 job ads which span quite a range of industries, titles and seniorities. The first ad was posted way back in 2015 but I would say the volume grew from 2017 onwards.

While I’m spending time cleaning the data, extracting and tidying info, I thought I’d give you the chance to ask some questions of your own that I can look at including in my analysis :D. I’ll also be periodically posting interim results to my newsletter, so if you’re interested in that do sign up below.

For starters, here’s a work-in-progress data dictionary:

  • id: Job posting unique ID – seems to be system generated and indeed unique
  • title: Job title – free-form text entry. I’ll attempt to extract seniority from here.
  • content: job description – free-form text entry (this is where I’ll be extracting skills like R, python, tableau etc from. I’ll also try detect whether the job is english langauge based or requires Dutch.
  • date – date the ad was posted (I’m curios to see how requirements have changed over time)
  • category – tag selection, each post can have multiple. Example of options are Business Analytics, healthcare, marketing analytics, public etc
  • city, region and company – all free text entry fields
  • hours – what the working hours are. In the Netherlands, its common for a jobs work hours to be less than 40 hours per week, or at least have the option of working just 4 days per week (salary is adjusted though đŸ˜‰ ). Usually an upper and lower limit is provided.
  • salary – This is quite unique amongst job sites! Free text entry field. Salary range for the role in Euros, often given as a range or a maximum, and mostly as a monthly pre-tax (“brutto”) amount. A quick glance shows about 360 roles have a usable salary range entered. This is probably only relevant if you are looking to work within the Netherlands or if nearby countries are an option for you. Benefits and tax rates all come into play which won’t make these numbers mean much elsewhere.

I’ve got some questions in mind for this data, and I’d like to invite you to fill out the short survey below to find out what it is YOU are interested in learning.

Thanks again to DataJobs.nl for giving me access to their data for this analysis. If you’re looking for a new role you should definitely check them out!

And one last thing – if you want to get updates of analyses that I do and get the final results, the best way to be notified is to sign up to my newsletter below.


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