Assessing The Degree Of Skill Intersection And Transferability Among Occupational Groups: Evidence From A Vacancy Analysis In Ukraine

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the labor market in Ukraine faced different changes. One of its biggest challenges is a contraction of numerous sectors due to various reasons such as loss of productive workers, destruction of firms’ infrastructure, and occupation of territories by Russia. After February 2022, the demand for workers across different sectors decreased significantly. As Figure 1 shows, all sectors experienced a very dramatic decline in 2022 in the number of vacancies compared to 2021 values. There are niches, such as IT and Culture, music, and entertainment, where the number of vacancies shrank by more than 50% in 2022. In 2023, they managed to achieve only up to 70% of the volume of vacancies in 2021. The most harmed sectors are Finance and Banking, Logistics, Warehouse and international commerce, and Retail. Despite that, these sectors managed to recover much better, as they have more than 70% vacancies compared to the 2021 volume.  The research question of this paper is what the level of intersection and transferability of skills between different occupations is. To give a precise answer to the question above, this paper aims to define how similar occupations are based on skills demanded in vacancies. Subsequently, the cluster analysis groups the occupations based on their similarities. The data on skills is gathered by web scrapping vacancies from