Skills and Jobs in Demand for the Circular Economy

The strategies and concepts specific to circular economy create new jobs or transform the existing ones. Our study aims to investigate the implications of the circular economy on the labor market. Essentially, our goal is to study the characteristics of circular jobs and to reveal the skills required to perform these jobs in different sectors of European economies. Our findings are drawn from textual data extracted from online recruitment platforms. Generally, text data is defined by high dimensionality; therefore, unsupervised learning techniques are used to summarize and unveil the hidden patterns. Text analysis is performed with Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), important tools for text categorization. Mainly, latent factors are extracted by analyzing correlations between terms, measured by the co-occurrences of terms across the documents representing the circular job advertisements. These techniques allow us to acquire some insight from vacancy descriptions in terms of skills. Results show that circular jobs and activities are enabled by skills in technical, systems and design, resource management, innovation, technology integration, and financial management domains. Our findings are relevant for educational and training programs targeting jobs that are conducive to circular economy.