April 24, 2017

Looking for jobs or internships is hard. Where do you begin? What do you put on your resume? What skills do you emphasize in the interview? These are the types of questions Judy Wei, a fourth-year international business, global supply chain and operations management, and marketing student, started asking herself when she started college, just as many students had before her. She, however, decided to find her own answer.

Although she knew she wanted to pursue business, Wei has always had a passion for data analytics. She decided to complete a business data analytics concentration and has already begun applying her skills to analyze job descriptions on Handshake.

“I think, in this day and age, data is important,” she said. “There’s a reason that the big data trend exists.”

Using all the job postings on Handshake from May to January — 17,000 lines of data — she has analyzed the text of each posting to draw out what skills employers are looking for. Through SAS text miner, software that finds information buried in unstructured text data, she has created a sort of search engine that allows you to type in a skill and see what words are commonly placed with it.

She has also used Tableau, a data visualization business intelligence software, to simplify that data into an easily searchable dashboard. In that program, she can select a state and see the number of job postings in each field for that area. By combining SAS text miner and Tableau, she can take it one step further and type in a skill to see how many jobs in that area are looking for that particular skill.

“One dashboard does it all,” she said. “It turns 17,000 lines of boring data into a cool visualization.”

After graduation, Wei will be working as a Lean Six Sigma practitioner in Charlotte.

Wei’s research, funded through a Magellan Grant, was presented during University of South Carolina’s Discovery Day on Friday, April 21, 2017.

By Madeleine Vath