Despite information failures in the labour market and their consequences on unemployment and informality rates, countries like Colombia lack a proper labour market information system to identify skill mismatches and employer skill requirements. The use of online job portals as a potential source of labour market information has gained the attention of researchers and policymakers since these portals can provide quick and relatively low-cost data collection. However, debates continue about the efficacy and robustness of job portals for labour market analysis. Accordingly, this book implements a novel mixed methods approach (e.g. web scraping, text mining, machine learning, etc.) in order to investigate to what extent a web-based model of skill mismatches can be developed for Colombia. This book contributes to our current understanding of the topic by developing a conceptual and methodological approach to identify skills, occupations, and skill mismatches using online job advertisements, which would otherwise be too complex to analyse via other means.

This book is included in DOAB.