Matching demand and offer in on-line provision: A longitudinal study of monster.com

Abstract

When considering the jobs market, changes or recurring trends for skilled employees expressed by employers' needs have a tremendous impact on the evolution of website content. On-line jobs sites adverts, academic institutions and professional development “standard bodies” all share those needs as their common driver for contents evolution. This paper aims, on one hand, to discuss and to analyse how current needs and requirements (“demand”) of IT skills in the UK job market drive the contents of different types of websites, in turn analysing whether this demand changes and how. On the other hand, it is studied what the UK higher education institutions have to offer to fulfill this demand. The results found analysing the evolution of the largest on-line job centre (www.monster.com), and the websites of selected UK academic institutions, demonstrate that often what is requested by UK industries is not clearly offered by UK institutions. Given the prominence of monster.com in the global economy, these results could provide a meaningful starting point to support curricula development in UK, as much as worldwide.