Uncovering IT Career Path Patterns with Job Embedding-based Sequence Clustering

45 Pages Posted: 27 Jun 2022 Last revised: 13 Oct 2023

See all articles by Hao Zhong

Hao Zhong

ESCP Business School

Chuanren Liu

University of Tennessee, Knoxville - Haslam College of Business

Chaojiang Wu

Kent State University

Date Written: June 9, 2022

Abstract

Extracting typical career paths from large-scale and unstructured talent profiles has recently attracted increasing research attention. However, various challenges arise in effectively analyzing self-reported career records. Inspired by recent advancements in neural networks and embedding models, we develop a novel career path clustering approach and apply it to uncover information technology (IT) career path patterns. Specifically, we construct employment profiles of over 60,000 IT professionals, and form their career path sequences by chaining the job records in each profile. Then we simultaneously learn cluster-wise job embeddings and construct career path clusters. The resultant cluster-wise likelihoods of career paths can quantify their soft bonding with different clusters, and the job embeddings can reveal connections among job titles within each cluster. With both real and simulated data, we conduct extensive experiments with our framework to establish the modeling performance and great improvement over the traditional optimal matching analysis methods. The empirical results from analyzing real data on career paths show that our approach can discover distinct IT career path patterns and reveal valuable insights.

Keywords: career path clustering, sequential job embedding, IT workforce

Suggested Citation

Zhong, Hao and Liu, Chuanren and Wu, Chaojiang, Uncovering IT Career Path Patterns with Job Embedding-based Sequence Clustering (June 9, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4140657 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4140657

Hao Zhong

ESCP Business School ( email )

79 avenue de la République
75011
France

Chuanren Liu (Contact Author)

University of Tennessee, Knoxville - Haslam College of Business ( email )

453 Haslam Business Building
Knoxville, TN 37996-4140
United States

Chaojiang Wu

Kent State University ( email )

Kent, OH 44242
United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
76
Abstract Views
427
Rank
648,722
PlumX Metrics