The Demand for Language Skills in the European Labour Market: Evidence From Online Job Ads

Abstract

We investigate foreign language skill demand and its determinants with a novel dataset, the Web Intelligence Hub's Online Job Advertisement (OJA) database, with information on about 53 million ads posted in 2021 for jobs in Europe. This unique dataset has been built crawling hundreds of job search engines and websites of public employment services, allowing us to identify foreign language requirements in OJAs at the NUTS-3 regional level. Moreover, we analyse how the demand for foreign languages varies at occupational level in the European countries as well as the possible macro factors (GDP, population density; participation rate in education and training; percentage of people employed in the high-tech sector and in the touristic sector) that could influence the request for foreign languages.

Keywords: Language skills, Labour market, Occupational groups, NUTS, Online job ads, Eurostat, English, German, Chinese, Big data, Web scraping

JEL Classification: J20, J24, R10