Web scraper for indeed job search to reveal the data scientist required skills keywords. Written in Python using requests, beautifulSoup and Selenium.

##How to use: In data_skills_1, job posts’ urls were collected with Requests package. In data_skills_2, job posts' urls were collected by directly clicking the links in Firefox controlled by selenium. Just change the start_url to wherever you want; also you can modify the skills dictionary, then you can get the job keywords in your field and your interested city!

##The story: When on your way to a data science career, what skills do you need to be a data scientist? Or, what skills are the companies looking for? I tried to answer these questions by looking up the job posts on indeed.com with web scraping. I collected all indeed's data scientist job posts’ requirements on data science skills from six cities, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Austin, Chicago and Detroit.

I build a web scraper with Beautifulsoup and selenium’s python package. After collecting all job posts’ urls with requests, I use selenium to automate Firefox (PhantomJS also works but I like to view the browser directly) to load the urls (due to the indeed’s Ajax requests package can't return the correct webpage); then parse the webdriver’s page source with beautifulsoup. And the beautifulsoup object will be cleaned and after text processing only data science skill keywords will be extracted. Then I count the frequency of each skill keyword and divide them by the total jobs found in that city to get a percentage of skills required. I gathered the data and stored them as a csv file.

##Results for 2016 April: For San Francisco, 2946 jobs are found and 40 kinds of keywords found, the top five required skills are Python, R, Hadoop, SQL, Java; For New York, 3263 jobs are found and 37 kinds of keywords found, the top five required skills are R, Python, Excel, SQL, C++; For Seattle, 1654 jobs are found and 35 kinds of keywords found, the top five required skills are R, Java, Python, SQL, Spark; For Austin, 285 jobs are found and 30 kinds of keywords found, the top five required skills are Python, Java, R, SQL, SAS; For Chicago, 798 jobs are found and 40 kinds of keywords found, the top five required skills are Python, Java, R, SAS, Hadoop; For Detroit, 358 jobs are found and 23 kinds of keywords found, the top five required skills are SQL, R, SAS, Matlab, Excel.

Below is a pic of the percentage of the skills being looked for at San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Blue for New York, orange for San Francisco and green for Seattle. X axis is for three cities and y axis is the percentage of the times of skills required by the number of job posts found.

Different cities prefer different data science skills and the requirements varies over time, the results I present here are for April 2016. Besides, the data scientist title includes positions for data analyst and data engineer, and different kinds of companies put different emphasis on the skills.