Critical workforce skills for bachelor-level geoscientists: An analysis of geoscience job advertisements

Abstract

Understanding the skills bachelor-level geoscientists need to enter the workforce is critical to their success. The goal of this study was to identify the workforce skills that are most requested from a broad range of geoscience employers. We collected 3668 job advertisements for bachelor-level geoscientists and used a case-insensitive, code-matching function in Matlab to determine the skills geoscience employers seek. Written communication (67%), field skills (63%), planning (53%), and driving (51%) were most frequently requested. Field skills and data collection were frequently found together in the ads. Written communication skills were common regardless of occupation. Quantitative skills were requested less frequently (23%) but were usually mentioned several times in the ads that did request them, signaling their importance for certain jobs. Some geoscience-specific skills were rarely found, such as temporal understanding (5%) and systems thinking (0%). We also subdivided field skills into individual tasks and ranked them by employer demand. Site assessments and evaluations, unspecified field tasks, and monitoring were the most frequently requested field skills. This study presents the geoscience community with a picture of the skills sought by employers of bachelor-level geoscientists and provides departments and programs with data they can use to assess their curricula for workforce preparation.

Geoscience Job Advertisements as a Barrier to Employment for People With Disabilities

“…We assigned each ad an occupation as defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018 Standard Occupational Classification Systems (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018) and an industry sector as defined by the 2018 American Geosciences Institute (AGI) Status of the Geoscience Workforce Report (Wilson, 2019). Additional details about the collection and classification of the job advertisements are described by Shafer et al (2023). When making comparisons among ads for different occupations, we only include occupations with >50 advertisements.…”

“…We created a third criterion to categorize how well a requested physical ability matched the core job description (Table 3). We used the case-insensitive, code-matching model and search criteria employed by Shafer et al (2023) to identify which ads from the set of 2,518 requested physical abilities. Our initial analysis indicated that driving was the most commonly requested physical ability.…”

“…A Google search on "geoscientists" yields images of scientists working in remote, rugged field locations. In reality, however, many geoscience careers are lab-based, computer-based (Shafer et al, 2023), or use techniques to acquire data that do not require physical mobility (Karpatne et al, 2018), much less extended field campaigns. The common perception that the geoscience workforce is only for the able-bodied may lead qualified people with disabilities to search for careers elsewhere.…”