Decade-Long Analysis of Skills Across 1 Million Graduate-Level Job Advertisements

This study sought to understand how the prevalence of employer-articulated technical and professional graduate skills shifted over a recent 13-year period to identify areas for curricular change. We analyzed 1,142,245 graduate-level mechanical engineering job advertisements posted between January 2010 and December 2022 in the United States from the Burning Glass Technologies (BGT) database. To track shifts in the prevalence of specific skills, we developed a Bayesian-optimized filter, trained on human labels, to classify relevant jobs, then modeled them using BGT’s canonical skill taxonomy. This filtering and modeling process identifies employer-desired competencies across 13 years, while demonstrating a replicable method for other disciplines and job data. We find 76 skills with an average prevalence of at least 2% that follow a clearly linear, logarithmic, or quadratic growth trajectory. The findings paint the portrait of a discipline firmly connected to its technical core, but transforming with demand for “business-aware technical liaisons” and “proficient software executors.” Business liaisons can complete technical work while managing the projects, budgets, supply chains, customer relations, and compliance mechanisms that come with it. Software executors use software-based systems to complete and communicate their organization-supporting work. Together, these profiles signal changes in graduate employability that universities can address through multiple approaches, such as collaborating with other academic units and disciplines and increasing access to bridge programs.