Analyzing Software Industry Trends to Improve Curriculum

In the present digital era, being skilled and updated on modern software development practices has become of crucial importance for software engineering graduates. Moreover, the freelancing industry has grown immensely in recent years, and individuals, more than ever before, are fascinated by the opportunities it offers and have greater assurance that it can be a successful and satisfying alternative to regular employment. Unlike others, in the case of software, industry is leading the education. This makes Software Engineering Education (SEE) additionally responsible for minimizing the gap between the skills of the graduating students and the skills needed by the employers out there. There is not any previous work available in this that focuses on the skills required to cope with the freelancing industry by graduate students and recommendations for improvements to Pakistan higher education curriculum that help produce graduates who are capable enough to get themselves employed in freelancing platforms. This study aims to dissect the software industry needs and trends related to the freelancing industry and to uncover suggestions for training in this dynamic field. The data was extracted through different freelancing platforms using the Scrapy framework of Python, and then LDA analysis was performed on the scraped data using Python to find the most trending topics in the SE field and better analyze the situation. Using LDA analysis, the dataset extracted at two distinct time periods is investigated to describe how the software industry changes from time to time. For validity, the updated data was scraped on runtime from freelancing websites. The results of the analysis are shown in different formats, and empirical findings are discussed with reference to two different time periods and in relation to previous studies.