Former White House CTO calls for open labour market data to address economic divide

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-30

Summary:

"Chopra believes that part of the solution to this 'angst' in the economy could be helped by the government opening up labour market data in a similar way that it has weather data, which has created competitive commercial opportunities in the private sector.

He explained that during his time as CTO he saw evidence of the problem that a lack of open labour market data creates, following President Obama’s pledge to bring back troops from the Middle East. He said:

Let me share a bit of context, it tells you the possibilities. President Obama in 2011 announces that we are going to bring troops home. And he asks the American people and the corporate community to agree to hire 100,000 veterans that are coming home. Massively bi-partisan, it was like, “we are there, sign us up”. Thousands upon thousands of jobs. Simultaneously veterans would come back and go through this transitional training programme, which was government developed – help them build resumes, help them get organised.

But like two ships in the night we learnt the following. I took a snapshot of data in 2014, where I hoovered up every job posting in Virginia from an employer that made a veteran hiring commitment. I then said to LinkedIn can you open up your skills taxonomy, read all of these job postings and tell me the strength of skill associated.

Then I went to the employment commission (every time you file for employment benefits you’re supposed to list the skills that you’ve got) – let’s see if we can open up the data to economists. Here are the skills of unemployed veterans, here are the job postings and the skills that they’re looking for – 23% of all job postings were entry level tech jobs.

Every single one of them could have been filled by an unemployed veteran that was tech trainable within 6 months, in those communities. I was talking to a recruiter at one of the big telecom companies, where he said, 'our software screens them out, they wouldn’t even make it through the first round'.

Chopra said that if the government did a better job of data labelling skills, in a similar way to LinkedIn, this data could be opened up and it would allow AI-driven platforms to be created that could match skills to vacancies."

Link:

http://diginomica.com/2017/05/30/former-white-house-cto-calls-open-labour-market-data-address-economic-divide/

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Tags:

oa.data oa.ssh

Date tagged:

05/30/2017, 20:54

Date published:

05/30/2017, 16:54