PhD Candidate on Skills, Education and Labour

Maastricht University (UM), Netherlands

Updated: 4 months ago
Job Type: Temporary
Deadline: 01 Dec 2022

You will work as a PhD candidate within the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA), one of the research departments of Maastricht University's School of Business and Economics (SBE). ROA has a leading position nationally and internationally in research in the field of education and the labour market. You will have access and contribute to ROA and SBE’s international network of renowned scholars, and you will also be part of the Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE) that coordinates SBE’s PhD programme.

Your PhD project will focus on the demand and supply side of skills in the labour market. Globalization, regionalization, flexibilization and technological change affect the demand for skills as production tasks. New technologies, for example, make some human skills redundant (e.g., physical skills), but others more important (e.g., analytical skills). This shifts the demand for skills both between and across jobs, and raises the question as to what extent education programmes are sufficiently performant at producing these new skills. In this PhD project, you will make use of text mining techniques to retrieve skills in demand (as voiced in vacancy texts) and those supplied in education (as stated in descriptions of education programmes). You will also make use of econometric methods applied to micro data to retrieve information on skills levels of recent graduates and match this to education programme descriptions to investigate 1) the match between programme descriptions and graduates’ perception of their skill levels, 2) the returns to skills in the job market, and 3) heterogeneity by individual characteristics and education programmes.


View or Apply

Similar Positions