Soft Skills in the Labour Market: Time Trajectories and Evolving Requirements in Tourism Professional Profiles

The recruitment process in the Labour Market has been always ruled essentially by two factors: the previous working experience and the analysis of the competences owned by the candidates. One of the most important innovations about this issue is represented by the focus on the skills moved from the hard to the field of the soft skills. This new point of view has generated an innovative way of choosing the hired candidates and produced a lot of scientific contributes on the theme. This study tries to analyze this topic starting from a large database provided by the Adecco Group and containing more than a million and half of job offers. For each job advertisement, information about the hired candidate are available in terms of personal details, previous experiences and owned soft skills. The job offers covered nine macro-economic sectors and the focus is here about the figures of the tourism sector. From a methodological point of view, since the Adecco Group dataset contains job offers from 2016 to 2024, a Weighted Factor Analysis has been implemented to reduce the number of the dimensions extracting the factors that characterize the most influential soft skills. This technique has allowed to detect cluster of soft skills and to underline differences among the tourism professional figures. Furthermore, the application of this approach led to the creation of the time trajectories drawn to follow the evolution of the requirements over the considered period.