Understanding the Future Green Workforce through a Corpus of Curricula Vitae from Recent Graduates

In view of the much-heralded ecological transition, to stay competitive and participate in the collective effort to face global warming and climate change, organisations need to select employees interested in and able to develop environmentally sustainable and innovative ideas. The existing literature however does not present consistent nor concordant results on the effective interest, involvement and expertise of Generation Z members – namely, the newest entrants into the workforce – in green issues. This study presents a corpus-assisted methodology to explore the profile of the upcoming workforce expected to present itself to companies. With CVs as one of the first interfaces between candidate and company in the recruitment process, a purpose-built corpus consisting of Curricula Vitae from recent graduates of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia was collected. Data is investigated through a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) framework, proposing a novel interaction between structured metadata and textual information. The original contribution of this approach lies in the extraction of information from the narrative structure of CVs which, guiding the evaluation and exploration of metadata, ensures that the knowledge value of the data can be explored in a discursive manner and not reduced to lists of competences and qualifications.