Farmers play a key role in the cross-border e-commerce sale of agricultural goods and the level of their professional literacy and the practicality of their functioning have a direct influence on end marketing results. With the competency demands of cross-border e-commerce marketing personnel as an analytical starting point, this paper gathers the data on the demand of talents in the online recruitment websites and extracts the corresponding texts using web-crawling tools. On such grounds, the LDA topic model is used to derive the main terms of e-commerce marketing talent as well as to group the most significant themes and the SOFM algorithm is additionally used to group the characteristics of the talent demand in order to discover the critical qualities necessary in the cross-border e-commerce marketing practitioners. The sample includes the recruitment ads of cross-border e-commerce marketing jobs found on mainstream Internet employment sites. Based on job duties and role characteristics, the agricultural product cross-border e-commerce positions are divided into four kinds, which include planning, promotion, research, and operation. Considering the demand trends and skills requirements in those categories, it is assumed in the paper that supply-side reforms in the training of farmers to agricultural-product cross-border e-commerce marketing need to be aligned with the characteristics of the product and the requirements of markets, as well as improve the quality of courses and extend training resources simultaneously.
