Panorama of the market demand for mechanical engineers in South American countries

Many educational institutions employ surveys in order to identify what majors to offer or what competencies to emphasize in their curricula. Different from a survey, we present an analysis of the labor market needs based on data collected from job ads available in the Internet. Tools of natural language processing (NLP) and statistical techniques have been employed to handle the job ads. For Peru, Chile and Colombia, a detailed panorama of the market demand has been depicted: mechanical engineering appears among the top most demanded engineering majors and maintenance is its most frequent technical requirement; management (project, quality and operations) related requirements also rank high, together with a working knowledge of English. By using diverse visualization techniques we can also show the "social network" of a major, where friendship is defined by the amount of job ads shared by any two majors.