A Systematic Literature Review of Youth Employment and

Employability in Morocco: Role of Data Mining Techniques

Aniss Moumen

Institute of Problem Solving, Science Engineering Laboratory, National School of Applied Science, Ibn Tofail University,

Kenitra, Morocco

Keywords: Data mining techniques, employability, graduate students, employment, unemployment, SLR

Abstract: Data mining (DM) is a method involving the all used techniques in data discovering; it aims to get beneficial

facts, which are hiding behind data. So, Data Mining techniques deploy several methods to discover patterns

and relationships between our data. In this paper, we present an overview of research works concerning by

youth employment and employability in Morocco; our goal is to identify and examine the contribution of data

mining techniques to analyze quantitative and qualitative data. This systematic literature review uses scientific

databases, repository and research engine to collect 186 references, between 1988 to 2020, we use IMIST

repositories, Google Scholar, Scopus, IEEE, Cairn.info, ScienceDirect, Persee, HAL and ILO Publication. As

a result of our queries and meta-analyze 1/3 of this corpus is in English, the Moroccan journal "Critique

économique" publish the most works in this topic and the authors " El Aoufi, Noureddine et al." produce

mostly the books about the subject "Employment" and "Employability" in "Morocco". After text analysis, we

found that theoretical works (63%) are more mostly present in this corpus than empirical works (37%).

Concerning Data mining techniques used in Moroccan works, we found that the Data mining algorithms are

used to explore the data, a few works utilize test hypothesis, classifications and prediction models.

1 INTRODUCTION

In Morocco, HCP employment survey shows that

since 2006 (HCP, 2006), the most active population

has been with a diploma: Higher level, but the

unemployment rate by diploma at the national level

reveals that the tendency to have higher levels of

education does not positively lead to a good

integration into the labor market. This is manifested

by the high unemployment rate which increases

significantly when the level of education increases.

Multiple factors influence the future of laureate

after they graduate from university. Thus, it leads us

to look for related works to treat this panoply of data

by multiple Data mining techniques.

In this paper, we will present an overview of the

most important Moroccan works about the

employment and employability of youth, and we

exam the use of data mining methods to analyze the

data collected from the survey, national or

international institutions.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5330-0136

2 DATA MINING

According to Jiawei Han (Han et al., 2012) Data

mining (DM) can be viewed as a result of the

evolution of information technology, Since the 1960s,

database and information technology has evolved

systematically from primitive file to sophisticated

database systems. The research and development in

database systems since the 1970s progressed from

early hierarchical and network database systems to

relational database systems, data modelling tools, and

indexing and accessing methods. From the mid-

1980s, after the establishment of database

management systems, database technology moved

toward the development of advanced database

systems and data mining for advanced data analysis.

Data mining techniques deploy several methods

to discover patterns and relationships between our

data. Data mining can be used in the various

important field as "Employment and Employability of

youth" which remains the primary concern and

commitment of any institution.

3 EMPLOYMENT AND

EMPLOYABILITY

The concept of employment or unemployment was

introduced for the first time by the theory of

unemployment attribute to Arthur Cecil Pigou (1933)

and updated by Robert M. Solow (1980) (Solow,

1980). Also, the theory of employment was attributed

to John Maynard Keynes, published in 1936 (Keynes

and Press, 2019), who defines that the employment is

determined not by the price of labour, as in classical

economics, but by the level of aggregate demand. In

1944, "Full employment" as a qualification of

employment, in the context of after second world war,

it's defined as "a theoretical level of unemployment

where only those who are unable to work, or who are

temporarily changing jobs, are considered

unemployed". In 1958, Alban Phillips (Phillips,

1958) established the relationship between the rate of

inflation and the rate of unemployment: when the

unemployment rate fell, wages rose, and companies

raised prices to restore their margins; conversely,

prices fall when unemployment increases. After this

Keynesian view of employment, in 1968, Milton

Friedman and Edmund Phelps introduce a new

attribute for employment, defined as: "natural rate of

unemployment" (Maurice, 1964), for Friedman and

Edmund, the employment is related to monetary

circulation and production (Phelps, 1968). In 1999,

International Labour Organization (ILO) (ILO,

1999),(Burchell et al., 2014) proposed a new

redefinition of the concept of "Quality of

Employment" or "Decent Work", as the respects

the fundamental rights of the human person as well as

the rights of workers in terms of conditions of work

safety and remuneration.

Concerning the employability and according to

authors (Deacken, 2015; Gazier, 1990; McQuaid and

Lindsay, 2005; Zgoulli-Swalhi, 2014), this concept

was introduced in United-Kingdom and USA, in 1900

and 1930 respectively. The first definition for

employability was the capability of an individual to

integrate job market. In the 1960s, this definition will

evolve the aptitude of an individual to work according

to her functional test. In the 1970s, the employability

became the attractivity of an individual for potential

employers, appreciated by the result of functional

tests, the ability to work and professional behaviours.

With this definition, we distingue two meaning of the

employability, the first one is conditioned by the

labour market and the second one, related to personal

characteristics. In the 1980s, according to the

Canadian Labour Force Development Board

(Zgoulli-Swalhi, 2014), the employability is the

capacity of an individual to achieve meaningful

employment given the interaction of personal

circumstances. In the 2000s, the definition of

employability will integrate other attributes as

mobility and knowledge of the labour market.

After this brief chronological introduction to

"Employment" and "Employability", we can

conclude that employment is a concept related to the

macroeconomic context. However, the employability

is related to both individual attributes and economic

context.

4 METHODOLOGY

Our purpose is to focus on the position that data

mining techniques could occupy in the service of the

employment and employability of young university

graduates in Morocco. We have conducted this

review in September 2020.

To elaborate our works, the keywords chosen are:

"employability", "employment", "unemployment",

"Morocco", in both languages "English" and

"French".

We perform those requests in scientific databases

and repositories: IMIST, Scopus, IEEE,Cairn.info,

ScienceDirect, International Labour Organization

Publication and Google Scholar. After extraction of

references, the Zotero database contains 186

references, which will be analyzed by NVIVO. In the

first step, we construct a text analysis to elaborate a

word cloud for each corpus (french and English) and

create codes for "Employment", "Unemployment"

and "Employability". Then we generate a crosstable

to identify what references related to nodes. Finally,

we extract all characteristics from NVIVO to SPSS

and elaborate our meta-analysis by sources, type of

references, language, authors, publications, year of

publication.

After this first part of our analysis, we go to

discuss all Empirical studies: quantitative and

qualitative, to identify what Data mining algorithms

use the authors to analyze and present their results.

5 RESULTS

5.1 Languages

We constitute our corpus by 186 references in both

language English and French. The proportionality of

french bibliography (70, 97%) is more than English

(29,03%).

This situation is due to the authors, especially in

management and social sciences, which utilize

French to communicate further than English. So to

analyze our corpus, we subdivide it into two

subcorpus: French and English.

5.2 Type of References

Articles constitute 66,6% of the corpus, with 55,4%

for french articles and 11,3% for the English. The

report is in the second-ranking with 6,4%, in this

category the English reports are mostly than french.

Table 1: Types of publications

Language

Total

English French

Article

21 103 124

Paper

7 4 11

Book

4 8 12

Video

1 0 1

Report

17 8 25

Chapter

4 1 5

These

0 8 8

Total

54 132 186

29,0% 71,0% 100,0%

5.3 Sources

In this synthesis, we are interested in works dealing

with "Employment" and "Employability" in the

Moroccan context, that is why the repository of

IMIST (Institue Marocaine de l'Information

Technique et Scientifique) is predominant in the

corpus, with 42%. In the second place, we found

Google scholar as an access point of secondary data,

followed by "Cairn" the repository of francophone

"Humain and Social Science" journals.

Table 2: Scientific databases or search engine * Language

Crosstabulation

Language

Total

English French

Cairn 1(,5%) 12(6,5%) 13 (7,0%)

Google

Scholar

22(11,8%) 25(13,4%) 47(25,2%)

Archives

Ouvertes

(HAL)

0(0,0%) 5(2,2%) 5(2,2%)

Research

Papers in

Economics

5(2,7%) 0(0,0%) 5(2,7%)

IEEE Xplore 2(1,1%) 0(0,0%) 2(1,1%)

International

Labour

Organization

Publications

4(2,2%) 0(0,0%) 4(2,2%)

OpenEdition 0(0,0%) 3(1,6%) 3(1,6%)

Open

WorldCat

2(1,1%) 2(1,1%) 4(2,2%)

Social

Science

Research

Net.

3(1,6%) 0(0,0%) 3(1,6%)

Persee 0(0,0%) 2(1,1%) 2(1,1%)

Revue

IMIST

2(1,1%) 77(40,9%) 78(41,9%)

ScienceDire

7(3,8%) 0(0,0%) 7(3,8%)

Scopus 4(1,6%) 1(,5%) 5(2,2%)

Theses.fr 0(0,0%) 2(1,1%) 2(1,1%)

Toubkal

IMIST

0(0,0%) 2(1,1%) 2(1,1%)

Others 2 (1,1%) 1(,5%) 3(1,6%)

Total 54 132 186

29,0% 71,0% 100,0%

5.4 Ye a rs

According to this corpus, concerning the years of

publications (figure 3), we remark that :

• First work dealing with "Employment" was in

1988

• Since the 2000s, "Employability" and

"Employment" become an important topic for the

community.

• More research published in 2017

Figure 2: Publication number by year.

5.5 Publications

The most important journals that published on

Employment and Employability in Morocco are:

"Critique économique", "Moroccan Journal of

Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Management",

"Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences" and

"Revue Economie, Gestion et Société".

"Critique Economique "(CR) is a journal founded

in 2000 by the research team from university

Mohamed V of Rabat. CR is interested in economic

subjects. We have found published on its 25 papers

related to employment and unemployment.

Table 3: Publication * Language Crosstabulation

Language

English French

Critique

économique

0 25 25

Dossiers de

Recherches en

Économie et Gestion

0 4 4

La Revue Marocaine

de la Pensée

Contemporaine

0 5 5

Moroccan Journal

of Entrepreneurship

0 7 7

Procedia - Social

and Behavioral

Sciences

6 0 6

Revue Economie,

Gestion et Société

0 6 6

Revue Marocaine de

Recherche en

Management et

Marketing

0 4 4

Total 54 132 186

CR is flowed by "Moroccan Journal of

Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Management"

(MJEIM) and " Revue Economie, Gestion et Société"

(REGS), launched in 2016. these journals are hosted

by IMIST.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, is an

Elsevier open-access collection of conference

proceedings published between 2009 and 2018, with

an emphasis in core social and behavioural sciences

disciplines. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Science

was indexed in Scopus.

5.6 French Word Cloud

The word cloud illustrated in the image below was

obtained after the analysis of collected abstracts of

French references. According to the occurrence of

words, it's seems that we have three categories :

• 1st category (high occurence) are respectively

"travail", "Emploi", "Maroc"

• 2nd category of words (between high and

medium occurence): "développement",

"diplômé", "formation", "chômage",

"économique", "marché","jeunes","recherche"

• 3th category of words (between medium and low

occurence) : "Employabilité",

"politique","programme","secteur","entreprise",

"supérieur","modèle","système","croissance","c

ompétences","entrepreneuriat","économique","f

acteurs","social","professionnelle","approche".

5.7 English Word Cloud

Concerning the English references, the word cloud

present three categories according to the word

occurrence:

• 1st category (high occurrence) are respectively

"data", "mining", "employment"

• 2nd category of words (between high and

medium occurrence): "student/students",

"graduate", "university", "skills", "algorithm",

"education","information","decision","analysis

• 3th category of words (between medium and low

occurrence): "Employability",

"prediction","classification","association","tree"

,"academic","higher","educational","quality","m

anagement","technology","factors","career","pr

ofessional","techniques","market".

5.8 Quantitative and Qualitative

Studies

From cloud word, we can elaborate on, the textual

requests to identify papers with empirical study, as

indicated below:

Words

Quantitative quantitative empirique

analyse déterminants facteur

factor empirical prediction

statistique statistic algorithm

classification association

donnée

Qualitative qualitative exploratory "étude

exploratoire" interviews

As a result, we found that in this corpus we have

61 references for a quantitative study, 6 references for

mixed study and 1 reference for a qualitative study.

We remark that the theoretical studies are dominated

in this corpus, with more than 60% of all references.

Table 5: Empirical * Language Crosstabulation

Language

Total

English French

Empirical Non-empirical

study

43 77 118

Quantitative

11 50 61

Qualitative

0 1 1

Mixte

0 6 6

Total

54 132 186

6 DISCUSSION

Regarding the results of corpus analysis presented

above, to elaborate our discussion, we will select the

works according to two criteria:

• The paper must present an empirical study or

documentary study with data analysis.

• The paper must include discussion employment

or employability for Moroccan students or youth.

6.1 Quantitative Studies

In 1995, World Bank (World Bank, 1995) elaborated

an economic study of the employment to describe,

first of all, the economic framework of Morocco and

the historical macroeconomic indicators. Also, in this

report world bank present the factors of the labour

market. We notice that this report include a univariate

and bivariate descriptive analysis.

In 2002, Mohamed Bougroum and Aomar Ibourk

(Bougroum and Ibourk, 2002a, 2002b) present two

studies about unemployment of graduate students in

Morocco, the authors used crosstable of historical

indicators, histogram, the test of hypothesis and

probabilistic model to predict unemployment of an

individual.

In 2004, Belghazi, Saâd (Belghazi, 2004)

presented an analysis of quality of employment

regarding many survey and data collected from an

official institutions, international and national

organization, as : HCP, CNSS, BIT, CGEM, AMITH.

The author use frequencies analysis and historical

data to describe the factor that affects employment

quality. Also, in the same year Aomar Ibourk

(Ibourk, 2004) describe the institutional support to

professional insertion of youth graduate. To present

his interpretation, the author utilizes crosstable,

percentage and effective analysis of data collected

from institutions (HCP, CNJA, CIOPE, ANAPEC,

OCP) and survey.

In 2005 and after in 2008, El Aoufi Noureddine

and Bensaïd Mohammed (Aoufi and Bensaïd, 2005;

El Aoufi and Bensaïd, 2008), edited a book about

employability and unemployment of Moroccan youth

people. The authors use crosstable, histogram,

graphics, percentage and also they present prediction

of some indicators as population.

In 2006, Nizar baraka et al. (Baraka and Benrida,

2006) present a study about employment and the

relationship with the economic context, labour market

and education system.

The authors present their result with crosstable of

historical data function of many variables (PIB,

Population, Age, Sexe...) also the authors use T-Test

to present a comparative study with other countries,

the data was collected from many international and

national institution (Ministère de l'emploi, Ministère

de l'économie, Conseil National de la Jeunesse et de

l’Avenir, HCP, OCDE).

In 2012, Bouzekri Touri (Bouzekri, 2013)

presented a study about the impact of the impact on

college students scientific content acquisition and

employment market Requirements in Morocco. The

author uses three tests for 1,456 students to

demonstrate that the students suffered from language

skills; this situation will impact their employability.

The author uses descriptive analysis, graphics,

crosstable and proportionality to present his results.

In 2014, Ibourk Aomar (Ibourk, 2014), present a

study about the attitude of youth graduate in the job

search process. The author uses a mathematical

model, an econometric model, hypothesis test and

multivariable analysis to describe the attitude of

youth. For the econometric model, the author uses a

database of 1 934 Moroccan students from four

universities: Moulay Ismail University, Chouaib-

doukali university, Mohamed Ist university and Cadi-

ayyad university. In the same year, Fatima

BOUTALEB (Boutaleb, 2014) present a conference

paper that includes a quantitative study with a

questionnaire about the effect of gender in

employability, this study concern ENCG and ENSA

laureates. Also, the author exposes a theoretical study

to elaborate a conceptual framework for

employability.

In 2019, Tejan et al. (Tejan and Sabi, 2019)

present a result of an empirical study conducted by

questionnaire about employability skills of graduate

students, This study involved 20 employers from

three sectors, primary education, banking and tourism

in the region of Marrakech-Safi. The authors use

Standard deviation and Mean to expose their results.

6.2 Qualitative Studies

In 2020, Balhadj Said et al. (Balhadj and Melhaoui,

2020) present a study about support for autonomy to

improve students’ perception of employability. The

authors adopt a qualitative approach for ENCG

students in Morocco. Also, NVIVO was used to

analyze the textual data.

6.3 Mixte Studies

In 1988, Mohamed Guedira (Guedira, 1988) focused

his works on non-adequation between educational

programs and labour market demand for economic

and management students. The author adopts an

approach qualitative by using interviews with

employers and quantitative study which use a

questionnaire with students and workers. Mohamed

Guedira uses manual text analysis for exploratory

research, and then he uses descriptive statistics

(frequencies and percentages) to present the result of

the questionnaire without any use of other Data

mining techniques, like regression or classification.

In 2014, Mohamed Essaoudi et al. (Essaoudi et

al., 2014) present an empirical study on evaluation of

the experience of the first year of employability

among novice inspectors of education in morocco.

The authors use interviews coupled to questionnaire

to collect a total of 26 novice inspectors opinions

about their first year as an inspector. Three data

collection tools were used according to the principle

of triangulation. The quantitative data analysis was

performed by different statistical treatments:

percentages, frequency distribution, and processing

correlational.

In 2020, Mezzour (Mezzour, 2020), present a

research project that combines Data Sciences and

Artificial Intelligence for Improved Youth

Employability in Morocco, the author use Natural

Language Processing (NLP) and Social Network

Analysis (SNA) techniques to analyze unstructured

and semi-structured text. The data was collected from

job ads of 10+ top Moroccan recruitment websites to

identify job market needs and then compare these

needs to university curricula.

7 CONCLUSIONS

According to this overview, data mining methods

have proven their utility to study employment and

employability in a different context. However, most

works collected in this corpus, present a view and

interpretation of data already collected and published

by institutional and organizations, under this

institutional references, the authors utilize descriptive

analysis to present their results. Also, we remark that

Moroccan references are mostly writing in French;

they are present in many scientific databases a

repository; this situation complicates the collection of

references. Finally, we conclude that Data mining

algorithms are mostly used to explore the data;

however, a few works utilize test hypothesis and

prediction models.

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