geographic area. We chose companies that were well known in the Brazilian professional market and published job ads for all regions of the country. Other criteria were the features of each website for searching and selecting the required information. These included the possibility of using search terms (production, operations, services, processes, quality, projects, industrial, factory and logistics), the clear disclosure of the requirements of each specific vacancy and a unique code to avoid having the same vacancy be considered more than once in the data collection and analysis for the survey. At the end of the process, six companies were selected, as shown in Table I. The content of the job offers presented in the selected sites was submitted to content analysis as prescribed by Bardin (2009, p. 44). The author content analysis as a "set of techniques for analyzing communications, aiming to obtain indicators (quantitative or non-quantitative), through systematic and objective procedures that allow the inference of knowledge regarding the conditions of production/reception of the analyzed messages." McDaniel (2004, p. 170) also stressed concern for the objectivity and systematization of content analysis, claiming it to be "a technique used to analyze written materials by dismembering them into meaningful units using carefully applied rules." The content analysis allowed the topics of operations management in demand by the companies to be extracted from the published ads. The frequency of appearance of each topic (significant unit) per vacancy was used as a proxy for the importance attributed to it. If a topic was referred to at least once in a specific job ad it was accounted for. This way, the maximum number of times a topic could appear in the study was limited to the total number of analyzed vacancy ads. While certain topics may not appear in the ads because the corresponding roles are already filled, new ads for vacancies represent an adequate proxy for the importance given to the different topics that comprise the operations management body of knowledge. Because many companies post ads, potential deviations in one direction are offset by deviations in the opposite direction, based on the principle of statistical centrality. Some bias may indeed exist, if specific topics are acquiring greater importance today than they had in the past, requiring companies to hire people with specific expertise previously nonexistent in their workforce. However, this bias, even if impossible to detect with the procedures adopted in the present study, contributes to highlighting topics that are increasingly demanded. This aligns with the objective of our research into the perceived needs of companies with respect to operations management knowledge and skills, which they are trying to meet by hiring new employees