Evaluating the association of state regulation of community health workers on adoption of standard roles, skills, and qualities by employers in select states: a mixed methods study

Background The occupation of community health worker (CHW) has evolved to support community member navigation of complex health and social systems. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics formally recognized the occupation of community health worker (CHW) in 2009. Since then, various national and state efforts to professionalize the occupation have been undertaken. The Community Health Workers Core Consensus (C3) project released a set of CHW roles and competency recommendations meant to provide evidence-based standards for CHW roles across work settings. Some states have adopted the recommendations; however, there are a variety of approaches regarding the regulation of the occupation. As of 2020, 19 U.S. states have implemented voluntary statewide CHW certification programs. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between state regulation of CHWs and adoption of standard roles, skills, and qualities by employers in select states. Methods This mixed methods study used purposive sampling of job ads for CHWs posted by employers from 2017 to 2020 in select states. Natural language processing was used to extract content from job ads and preprocess the data for statistical analysis. ANOVA, chi-square analysis, and MANOVA was used to test hypotheses related to the relationship between state regulation of CHWs and differences in skills, roles, and qualities employers seek based on seniority of state regulatory processes and employer types. Results The mean job ads with nationally identified roles, skills, and qualities varies significantly by state policy type (F(2, 4801) = 26.21) and by employer type (F(4, 4799) = 69.08, p = 0.000). Conclusions Employment of CHWs is increasing to provide culturally competent care, address the social determinants of health, and improve access to health and social services for members of traditionally underserved communities. Employers in states with CHW certification programs were associated with greater adoption of occupational standards set by state and professional organizations. Wide adoption of such standards may improve recognition of the CHW workforce as a valuable resource in addressing the needs of high-need and marginalized groups.

Analysis of professional requirements for a modern logistician

The article is devoted to the research of modern labour market requirements for experts in logistics. The reasons of logistics importance for the proper functioning of national and international economies were outlined. The list of requirements set by business representatives to successful candidates is summarized. The analysis of the job market was performed using topic-related websites that cover job markets in Ukraine, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Austria, Slovakia and the Russian Federation. Empirical studies, data analysis and synthesis, expert assessments, and generalization methods were used to perform the scientific inquiry. The number of specific competencies mentions in the job ads analyses and the relative difference between studies’ indicators were counted. It was revealed that there is a great demand in almost all areas of the economy for logistics specialists. The tendency to find the personnel, who are willing to learn and improve on a continual basis, and can demonstrate a larger range of soft skills in addition to being an effective communicator, has been traced. Assumptions were made about possible changes in the requirements of employers to candidates, in connection with the presence of drivers of Industry 4.0 environment forming. Recommendations for further research of labour market requirements were provided.

Skills2Graph: Processing million Job Ads to face the Job Skill Mismatch Problem

In this paper, we present Skills2Graph, a tool that, starting from a set of users’ professional skills, identifies the most suitable jobs as they emerge from a large corpus of 2.5M+ Online Job Vacancies (OJVs) posted in three different countries (the United Kingdom, France, and Germany). To this aim, we rely both on co-occurrence statistics - computing a count-based measure of skill-relevance named Revealed Comparative Advantage (rca) - and distributional semantics - generating several embeddings on the OJVs corpus and performing an intrinsic evaluation of their quality. Results, evaluated through a user study of 10 labor market experts, show a high P@3 for the recommendations provided by Skills2Graph, and a high nDCG (0.985 and 0.984 in a [0,1] range), that indicates a strong correlation between the experts’ scores and the rankings generated by Skills2Graph.