Zachary Howes

My name is Zachary Howes, and I am a fourth-year Public Policy Analysis major with minors in Economics and International Studies. This summer, I worked with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) in the Labor Market Information Bureau (LMI) in the Office of Workforce Development (OWD). I assisted with a variety of data entry and cleaning projects, analyzed skill and credential data from job postings using RStudio and Tableau to create dashboards, and created natural language processing scripts for analyzing job postings data. For my project, I used data from TalentNeuron to identify what the most important skills and credentials for technicians are and visualized these in a Tableau dashboard published on the Ohio LMI website. I also created RStudio scripts to explore if ODJFS could develop customized natural language processing tools to better extract job ad data compared to commercial tools. My favorite thing about the internship was creating dashboards and learning how to convey data in an easy-to-understand way for a general audience. The most challenging thing about this internship was learning to code in R, as it was a language I had never coded in before. However, the ODJFS researchers that I worked with were incredibly helpful in teaching me how to use it. I would definitely recommend this internship to anyone who is interested in improving their data science skills or better understanding the experience of working in a state agency. I also think that the poster presentation at the end is a very useful means of highlighting the skills I built in a tangible way.

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