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It has become a not-to-be-missed event: the traditional Open data hackathon took place on 24 and 25 October. After previous editions devoted to the Luxembourg language, housing and mobility, this year more than thirty experts from all walks of life came to put forward their ideas for making better use of the employment portal's data.

The event brought together 35 people from several countries - including Belgium and Estonia - and from the business world, government institutions, public establishments and universities. Six groups were formed to work on proposals aimed at making it easier to find a job.

Two days is a short time, especially when you consider the ambitions of the projects presented. Here are a few examples from the presentations screened at the end of the marathon:

• Making it easier to match the skills proposed in CVs with the skills requested in job offers. Several teams have been looking at ways of better matching skills with job offers. To this end, research was first carried out to analyse the top 7 most in-demand skills and the top 7 skills most frequently mentioned in CVs, all in the ADEM 2022-2024 database. In a second stage, the project team determined the five key skills linked to the five most frequently published vacancies. On this basis, a map of Luxembourg was drawn, representing for each municipality and each canton the leading economic activity over this period, but also specifying over these three years the evolution of a specific demand according to the criteria filled in by the user. Finally, depending on the area of interest, the tool suggests that the user add to his or her skills with those that will enable him or her to offer a rich and appropriate range of knowledge;
  
  
• Provide job seekers with employer-related clues (e.g. high turnover in the company);
• Position your CV correctly in the ESCO classification, which categorises skills, competences and professions relevant to the EU labour market;
  
• Analyse the skills required in relation to the ESCO classification;
• Explore skills in the Grande Région, but also trends in skills from abroad, all presented in the form of a data visualisation;
  
• Help target the skills that are in demand in the long term, the skills that are emerging and, consequently, what Luxembourg can offer job seekers;
• In the same vein: optimising CVs to match them more closely with job offers. Here, an interface lets you upload a CV before specifying the degree of proficiency for each skill, with each pre-calculated result being able to be refined by the user;
  
• Correct possible semantic mismatches between the terms used by the jobseeker and those used by the company advertising its vacancies. For example, job seekers may focus their search on certain job titles, leaving out opportunities that could have suited them. The idea, then, is to improve the visibility of the careers they are likely to embrace.
  
• Offer a tool for highlighting the most relevant skills on a CV. The underlying idea is to attract the attention of HR departments, but also to quickly create tailor-made CVs for a specific job, with an assistant supporting the candidate not only in terms of content (professional experience is rewritten according to the skills selected) but also in terms of form (by adapting the style, for example, according to the sector of activity). Among the challenges faced by the team: prioritising skills, or the best way to name and label a skill. One of the next steps they had in mind was the idea of displaying the skills that candidates still lacked in the form of cards, leaving them free to select the ones they wanted to develop.
  

To carry out their developments, participants had access to datasets from ADEM, ESCO and Eurostat/Web Intelligence Hub. Some went further afield, for example into the datasets of the Digital Learning Hub in Luxembourg.

The event, which took place at GovTech Lab, was introduced by Inès Baer and Gabriele Marconi from ADEM's Statistics Department. The ESCO team from the European Commission gave a much-appreciated presentation on the ESCO framework and taxonomy.

In addition to strict coding skills, particular attention has often been paid to the interfaces, from data visualisation in the form of mapping or networked bubbles to voice communication with a Chatbot capable of refining job searches in line with ESCO skills. A prototype mobile app, already well advanced, was also unveiled.

The creativity, inventiveness, originality and relevance of the designs submitted lived up to expectations. We're already counting on you for the 2025 edition!