Fig 1.
a. Schematic of text embedding. The diagram shows the embedding process, where textual descriptions of skills and VET courses are transformed into vector representations using a pre-trained Sentence Transformer model. b. Schematic of constructing a course network from the course-skill bipartite network. The course network is the co-skill network of VET courses. c. Illustration of the course network. Each node represents a VET course that has more than one neighbor from the course-skill bipartite network. The node color signifies the VET course category, while the node size demonstrates the degree centrality. Links are omitted in the visualization for simplicity. The colored nodes represent the top 10 categories with the highest number of VET courses, highlighting the most dominant sectors in SkillsFuture Singapore.
Fig 2.
The k–core subgraph with k = 100.
The color of the nodes indicates different VET course sectors.
Table 1.
Regression analysis on VET course influence. VET course labels are under control within the model.
Fig 3.
Course influence and VET specificity.
a. Comparison of course influence across different VET sectors. The box plot includes the median, quartiles, and 1.5 interquartile range (IQR) of course influence values for each VET sector. The dashed line indicates the overall median value of course influence over all sectors. b. The relationship between the specificity and course influence at the VET sector level. The horizontal axis represents the median specificity for each VET sector, while the vertical axis represents its median course influence. The text labels and the shade denote the name of VET sectors and the confidence interval of the simple linear regression, respectively.
Fig 4.
Occupational course supply and comparison with transferability.
a. Construction of the course-occupation network from the tripartite network of courses, skills, and occupations. Links are connected for entities with embedding similarity higher than 0.6. b. OCS index for each occupation sector in Singapore. The average for each sector is denoted by a red triangle, and the blue dashed line indicates the average of the OCS index over all occupations. The box plot denotes the median, quartiles, and 1.5 IQR. c-e. Comparison of the average OCS index and average transferability for care economies (c), digital economies (d), and industrial 4.0 economies (e) across occupation sectors. The colored line and shade represent the simple regression plot and its confidence interval, respectively.