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ASP, the art and science of practice: skills employers want from operations research graduates.

Article Excerpt
We analyzed the text of more than 1,000 ads for operations research (OR) jobs. Our objective was to help industry employers benchmark the skills they are seeking in OR graduates with those that other employers are seeking. Educators can also compare their offerings against the skills industry employers seek. We found that employers of OR graduates consistently require modeling, statistics, programming, and general analytical skills in an operations management context as their primary requirements regardless of sector, function within company, and even degree type. These employers also require communication, leadership, project management, spreadsheet and database, and team skills in that order.

Key words: personnel; OR/MS education; OR/MS policy standards; data analysis.

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For our analysis, we collected 1,056 ads--408 from Monster.com, 362 from OR/MS Today, and 386 from Hotjobs.com. After collecting these ads in a database, we manually coded categories for the industry sector (e.g., computer services, banking, consulting), which we adapted from Fortune magazine's classification, and the function (e.g., marketing, IT) within the company.

Our sample uses only online ads for jobs that are based in the United States. Moreover, some jobs are not advertised. However, our broad findings are consistent in terms of the relative importance employers give to various skills across industry sectors, functions, and degree types. Therefore, we do not believe this is a major concern.

Statistical Analysis of Text

We developed a list of more than 300 relevant phrases and words (key words) that occur in these ads and arranged these key words into 15 categories and 49 subcategories. We infer the skills as well as the academic degree required (BS, MS, MBA, or PhD) from the text of these ads by counting the number of ads that include any of these key words. When a key word occurs in an ad, we also increment the number of relevant job ads for the parent subcategory and category (Table 1).

For example, if the phrase "bachelor's degree" (or a variant such as "BS degree") appears in an ad, we increment our count by one for ads that require a bachelor's category. If the ad specifies "bachelor's or master's," we increment the count for ads requiring master's degrees as well. Some ads have no degree requirements. Thus, categories such as bachelor's or master's are neither mutually exclusive nor...

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