Google announced an update to the “JobPosting” structured data. The new structured data relate to education and experience requirements. These new job posting structured data are beta and how they will display in search is still under development.
The new Schema structured data appear to be related to Google’s Career Certification Courses intended for training workers in a new field.
It may not be a coincidence that Google’s Career Certification Courses and the updated structured data to accommodate non-degree and experience related data were both announced on the same day.
The fact that one of the structured data types has a typo in it seems to suggest that the notation was rushed out.
To show how beta these new structured data markups are, Schema.org has some of these structured data listed as pending on March 8, 2021 and Google announced them three days later on March 11, 2021.
JobPosting Structured Data
JobPosting structured data is eligible for a unique form of user experience in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
Because of that, the JobPosting structured data is important for competing against other websites that show job postings.
Beta Structured Data
Google lists these as the beta structured data
- educationRequirements.credentialCategory
- eexperienceRequirements
- experienceRequirements.monthsOfExperience
- experienceInPlaceOfEducation
Note that the second one is misspelled and should properly be written as experienceRequirements.
These new structured data types are intended to fill a void in the current schema.org choices that allows publishers to markup the requirements but doesn’t allow to show when it doesn’t require a degree.
New Structured Data Requested By Google
According to the Schema.org GitHub page, these new structured data were requested by Google in August 2020:
“This is a proposal from Google to improve schemas around JobPosting and Occupation so that we can explicitly indicate when degree-level qualification is not required.
We would like to find a quick path to an initial approach, while simultaneously opening conversations around how to best model this (e.g. adding more granularity, country-specific details etc.).
We believe that adding this basic expressivity could lead to improved Job search (in Google services and elsewhere) for job seekers with lower levels of education.”
Schema.org states that this is designed to help out of work people during the pandemic:
“With the COVID-19 response in mind, it would be good to find an immediate workaround for this gap in Schema.org:
We have https://schema.org/educationRequirements (on JobPosting and Occupation) which allows Text values, as well as EducationalOccupationalCredential to express what is needed for some job, but not what isn’t.
With millions experiencing unexpected unemployment due to the COVID situation, moving quickly here could have a significant impact.”
Here’s an example of the experienceRequirements and monthsofExperience properties in use:
<html>
<head>
<title>Software Engineer</title>
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context" : "https://schema.org/",
"@type" : "JobPosting",
"title" : "Software Engineer",
"educationRequirements" : {
"@type" : "EducationalOccupationalCredential",
"credentialCategory" : "bachelor degree"
},
"experienceRequirements" : {
"@type" : "OccupationalExperienceRequirements",
"monthsOfExperience" : "36"
},
This is how Google’s new beta job posting structured data is described:
“In addition to the recommended JobPosting properties, you can add the following beta properties to add more information about the education and experience of a job posting. Since we are still developing how we are using this information, you may not see any appearance or effect in Google Search right away.”
Should You Use These Properties?
It may be useful to add these beta properties into your structured data in order to be ready to take advantage of new search experiences in the SERPs once these go live.
These new structured data were specifically requested by Google apparently as a way to integrate with Google’s new certificate program that is intended to help jobless people transition to currently in-demand jobs.
