Analysis of Vocational Education and Training and the Labour Market in Catalonia. A Data-Driven Approach.

In this paper, we introduce BDFP, an ongoing project developed by the Big Data Center of Excellence of Barcelona which aims at analysing the Vocational Education and Training (VET) and its demand in the labour market. The main contribution of the project is the development of a data science-based solution to assist policymakers to design effective policies that help on building the bridge between the VET educational system and the labour demand. The project combines data sources from both the job market and educational domains, leveraging machine learning for breaking the existing information silos and develop a set of visualisations, reports and dashboards that enable the combined study of both the VET and the jobs market. The present article describes the process of inception and development of the tools and details preliminary results that are currently being analysed together with domain experts of both fields. The final results will be compiled in a final report that will be publicly available.