Identifying the Skills and Competencies Required for Facility Management Roles: A Text Mining Study

Due to the impact of facilities on the performance of the workforce, there has been a growth in the demand for facilities managers across the globe. To address this shortfall in skills, universities are creating various programmes to satisfy the needs of the industry. However, the skills and competencies required to succeed as facilities managers in the various sectors of the economy remains unclear. The current study seeks to address the gap in knowledge by uncovering the core and soft skills required for facility management job roles. Job advertisements are scrapped from webpages of a job board. The job adverts contain information about qualifications and essential skills required for facility management job roles. Text mining was used to analyse the collected data. Based on the frequency of mention, it was found that risk management, people management, operations and maintenance and procurement are the topfour core skills. Also, team building, problem-solving, communication and time management are the top soft skills required for facility management practice. The findings emerging from this study provides information that can be used for the development of the curriculum for facilities management programmes.