Keywords
Strategic Workforce Intelligence
Labour-Market Analytics
Institutional Competitiveness
Curriculum Strategy
English for Specific Purposes
Automotive Industry
Chinese Universities
How to Cite
Abstract
Purpose: The aim of this study is to develop a Competitive Intelligence (CI) framework that transforms labour-market signals into Strategic Workforce Intelligence (SWI) for the curriculum strategy of Chinese universities offering automotive English for Specific Purposes (ESP) tracks, positioning CI as an institutional capability for sustaining competitive advantage in graduate employability and institutional responsiveness to industrial change.
Methodology/Approach: A quantitative, secondary-data design grounded in the publicly available Job-SDF Chinese-recruitment benchmark covering 36 months of monthly hiring demand between January 2021 and December 2023 was adopted. The pipeline isolates an industrial proxy of six L1 occupations representing 80.0 % of platform-wide hiring volume. Communication-relevant skills are separated from industrial domain-specific skills via a normalised cross-occupation entropy criterion, and trajectory dynamics are characterised through OLS regression, Spearman correlation, compound annual growth rates, structural-break analysis, and K-means clustering. The Resource-Based View, the Knowledge-Based View, and Dynamic Capabilities theory anchor the integrated four-tier conceptual framework.
Findings: The analytical sample contained 45,046,064 recruitment observations across 1,651 skills (18 communication and 1,633 industrial). Recruitment demand grew at compound annual rates of 32.3 % for industrial and 21.8 % for communication skills (both statistically significant), and 33.4 % of skills exhibited structural breaks. K-means clustering identified a slow-rising stable cluster (the curriculum spine, dominated by communication skills) and a high-acceleration industrial cluster (the agile periphery). Occupation-level mapping revealed pronounced asymmetries that justify differentiated curriculum tracks aligned with destination occupations.
Originality/Relevance: The paper extends Competitive Intelligence from corporate strategy into higher-education curriculum governance and formalises Strategic Workforce Intelligence as a new construct anchored in RBV, KBV, and Dynamic Capabilities theory. Methodologically, it grounds curriculum decisions in 45 million labour-market observations through a privacy-respecting entropy filter. Practically, it equips Chinese universities with a CI-driven decision architecture for sustaining industry-aligned ESP programmes and provides a reproducible analytical pipeline transferable to other industry-aligned academic programmes.
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