Burning Glass Technologies’ data use in policy-relevant analysis: An occupation-level assessment

This work proposes an analysis of the statistical properties and distributional characteristics of Burning Glass Technologies’ (BGT) data on online job openings from platforms and companies, at the occupation level. BGT data are compared to official data on employment by occupation to assess their occupation-specific representativeness. This work further proposes weighting schemes aimed at making BGT-based analysis fully representative at the occupation and country levels, where appropriate.The analysis encompasses six economies – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States – for the period 2010-19. Overall, it finds that BGT data exhibit good statistical properties and are a useful source of timely information about labour market demand, especially for high-skill occupations and recruitment processes that are more likely to happen online.