Are Universities Ready to Deliver Digital Skills and Competences? A Text Mining-Based Case Study of Marketing Courses in Italy

We still know little about the role of higher education in the digital transformation. If on one side the labor market is constantly evolving and is asking for an up-skilling process of the workforce, higher education institutions struggle to be agile enough. Therefore, it is necessary to measure and to better understand this gap. In this paper, we describe a quantitative approach to deal with this problem, focusing on the marketing sector. Through text mining, we develop a model of automatic job competencies extraction from Italian texts. We use it to retrieve the skills expressed both in the exam's descriptions of universities and the job vacancies. The results allow us to compare the skills offered by higher education with the labor market's needs in Italy, exploring and highlighting the digital gaps existing between the two.