The second phase of selecting the job vacancies to comprise the corpus of analysis consisted of reading the job descriptions and required activities, eliminating those that did not refer to operations management. All vacancies selected for this study required (complete or in progress) college training in business administration or production engineering. The study included all the vacancies offered during one month, in classified ads published in the six websites (see Table D). During the data collection period, each site was checked once a week. Each advertised vacancy bid was considered only once, regardless of how long it was posted. 1.3 Thematic classification of job vacancies After selecting the vacancy ads considered pertinent to the area of operations management, we performed a thorough analysis of their content. As we analyzed excerpts from the text (phrase, sentence, paragraph section or whole paragraph), their content was associated with one or more of the 36 topics proposed in the consolidated mapping of operations management topics, as per Peinado and Graeml (2013). For example, the text excerpt: "coordinate the entire process of product manufacturing, aiming at meeting the quality and productivity goals established by the company" was associated with the topic production management. On several occasions, a single piece of text could be associated with more than one theme. Thus, the text: "coordinating projects related to the area, aiming to increase productivity, realign goals and monitor plant performance through KPIs" was associated to the following themes: project management (coordinating projects related to the area); and measurement of performance and productivity (monitoring plant performance). 4.1 Identification of the company's sector of activity The companies offering the vacancies were also classified according to their industry. The two possibilities were manufacturing companies and service providers. For each vacancy