Analysing the Gap between Labour Market Demands and MOOC Offerings of Artificial Intelligence skills through Natural Language Processing

The digitalized society is undergoing a revolution, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) playing a central role. While the impact of AI has received significant attention in recent years, companies are prioritising skills over technologies in their digital transformation efforts, particularly those related to AI. Traditional educational systems face challenges in adapting to the demand for AI skills, while online course providers like MOOCs offer flexibility in rapidly addressing this gap. However, the alignment between the skills offered by MOOCs and those demanded by the labour market remains underexplored. This paper aims to investigate this alignment using a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach. The proposed approach involves collecting job vacancies and MOOCs descriptions, extracting skills using NLP, refining the results, and analysing alignment between datasets. The study identifies three clusters of AI-related skills based on their frequency in job vacancies and MOOCs descriptions: aligned skills, skills more present in job vacancies and skills prevalent in MOOCs. The research gives valuable insights to understand the alignment between available and demanded AI-related skills, aiding educational providers in addressing skill gaps currently present on the market.