Our most recent update to Pathways involves the live job vacancies feed which is part of the regional data screen. The regional data screen allows students to view regional Labour Market Information for a specific job. This includes salary information and future employment statistics both of which are compared to the national average.
In order to add a sense of reality to this screen we also show related live job vacancies so that students get a sense of the jobs currently available in their area as well as the salaries being offered for those jobs.
Previously, Pathways accessed its job vacancies via a feed from Reed’s database of jobs, however we found that for some of the occupations featured in Pathways this database just wasn’t returning the breadth of vacancies that we needed.
As a result we began looking around for an alternative feed that would aggregate job vacancies from multiple job boards, therefore giving us access to a massive amount of live vacancies in which to pull data from.
The solution we chose to use was Adzuna (www.adzuna.co.uk). Adzuna is a UK based company who search and aggregate jobs from thousands of job websites. As a result Pathways now has access to over one million unique job vacancies. Adzuna also offers excellent search filters so that we can be very specific about the occupations we are searching for, as well as allowing us to tailor the results on a regional basis.
One of the interesting aspects of this new data is that it highlights all the different nuances of jobs that are available under a single occupation classification. For example, for the job occupation ‘Psychologist’ the data brings back vacancies for the following jobs:
- Clinical Psychologists
- Lawyer - Mental Health
- Psychology Teacher
- Mental Health Practitioner
- Mental Health Nurse
- Forensic Psychologist
- Mental Health Advocate
This of course then broadens students' awareness of the jobs that are available in this occupation area.
There are a few other interesting datasets that Adzuna offer including ‘top companies’, which shows the top companies that are hiring on a regional basis for a specific job occupation. They also aggregate their own salary data, both on a national and regional basis.
The upshot of all of this is that Pathways now has a much extended job vacancy feed and in the future we may well be making use of some of Adzuna’s other datasets to further enrich the tool.
