Publication
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has considerably sped up the pace of skill changes in many professional domains, with scores of new skills emerging and many old skills moving towards obsolescence. For these domains, identifying the new necessary skills in a timely manner is a difficult task, where existing methods are inadequate. Understanding the process, by which these new skills and technologies appear in and diffuse through a professional domain, could give training providers more time to identify these new skills and react. For this purpose, in the present work, we look at the dynamics between online learning platforms and online hiring platforms in the software programming profession, a rapidly evolving domain. To do so, we fuse four data sources together: Stack Overflow, an online community questions and answers (Q&A) platform; Google Trends, which provides online search trends from Google; Udemy, a platform offering skill-based Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) where anyone can create courses; and Stack Overflow Jobs, a job ad platform. We place these platforms along two axes: i) how much expertise it takes, on average, to create content on them, and ii) whether, in general, the decision to create content on them is made by individuals or by groups. Our results show that the topics under study have a systematic tendency to appear earlier on platforms where content creation requires (on average) less expertise and is done more individually, rather than by groups: Stack Overflow is found to be more agile than Udemy, which is itself more agile than Stack Overflow Jobs (Google Trends did not prove usable due to extreme data sparsity). However, our results also show that this tendency is not present for all new skills, and that the software programming profession as a whole is remarkably agile: there are usually only a few months between the first Stack Overflow appearance of a new topic, and its first appearance on Udemy or Stack Overflow Jobs. In addition, we find that Udemy's agility has dramatically increased over time. Our novel methodology is able to provide valuable insights into the dynamics between online education and job ad platforms, enabling training program creators to look at said dynamics for various topics and to understand the pace of change. This allows them to maintain better awareness of the trends and to prioritize their attention, both on the right topics and on the right platforms.