analysing job opportunities for linguists: a follow-up analysis of job advertisements to the upskills needs analysis

The language industry is undergoing a period of considerable changes, influenced by a variety of trends, among which there is the continuous development of new technologies. To better understand how the industry demands towards professionals are changing, this thesis offers an update of the analysis of job advertisements for linguists carried out within the UPSKILLS project in 2021, and of its 2023 follow-up version, the WEBCTRL corpus. UPSKILLS is a corpus of job advertisements that require linguistics, technological and research skills published up to 2021, whilst the WEBCTRL corpus contains job announcements collected and analysed with a similar methodology. This thesis illustrates the creation of the UPSKILLS25 corpus, created collecting job advertisements for similar positions published in 2024-2025, following the selection criteria derived from the UPSKILLS corpus. The objective of this work was to analyse the collected job announcements to identify their characteristics in terms of requested competences and skills, job responsibilities, and job titles. The extracted data were then compared to those collected from the UPSKILLS corpus and the WEBCTRL corpus to highlight similarities, differences, as well as trends in the evolution of such job positions. The main findings suggests that the while linguistics, technological and transversal skills remain fundamental for this category of jobs, these are increasingly influenced by the adoption of AI and the provision of AI-related services. The trends highlighted in the analysis of the UPSKILLS25 corpus can serve as a contribution for a broader reflection on the new skills and competences required to work in this field. Future studies could continue to monitor the evolution of job offers in the next years, for example creating a larger corpus or monitoring additional aspects, such as the type of contracts that are being offered.