Job vacancies update - 11-Jun-2009

Your regular amateur analysis of the UK's job vacancies scene from ground-breaking attack blog illandancient.

Total vacancies in the UK 400,887
Down 0.40% from last week
Up 1.36% from last month
Down -7.54% from last quarter

Here's your regular graph showing how many job vacancies are listed on reed.co.uk and the Job Centre Plus. A wee caveat about the JCP is that the total jobs listed on their site is updated in real time, so it varies depending on the time of day, contrast this with Reed who update their total daily.


Based on Gordon Brown saying there was 500,000 job vacancies in PMQs back in February, we can look at how the number of vacancies on the job sites have varied and we extrapolate it up to a total figure for vacancies in the UK.


We're on about the same level as last week, which is a little promising, its not getting worse and if you're optimistic you could say that the green shoots of a happier job vacancies scene are still doing whatever it is green shoots do.

Anyhoo, looking now at the breakdown of sectors on reed.co.uk, which ones have grown and shrunk compared to last month:-

Motoring and Automotive 16%
Social Care 14%
Retail 14%
Manufacturing 14%
Strategy and consultancy 13%
Legal 9%
Purchasing 9%
Banking 9%
Actuarial 9%
Public Sector 8%
Hospitality 8%
Health 7%
Education 6%
Human Resources 5%
Sales 5%
Graduate 5%
Financial Services 5%
Recruitment Consultancy 4%
Temporary Work 4%
Admin 3%
Management 2%
Transport and logistics 2%
IT Contractor 2%
Leisure and tourism 2%
Accountancy Qualified 2%
Construction and Property 0%
Customer Service 0%
Multilingual 0%
General Insurance -1%
Charity and Voluntary -1%
Marketing and PR -1%
Engineering -2%
IT and Telecoms -4%
Media, Digital and Creative -4%
Accountancy -4%
Scientific -5%
FMCG -10%
Training -25%

Some of those categories are all over the place, one day there's hundreds of vacancies, a week later there's not so many and a week later there's hundreds more. Take Graduate jobs for instance:-

Sure its up 5% from a month ago, but compared to three months back, its a sector that shits dead rats. Well, its just a seasonal thing innit, anyone who was going to be taking graduates was hoovering them up three months ago, and no, its just background radiation.

Its a similar story with Management and Accountancy jobs

The number of vacancies decreased steadily until some point in the middle of April, and then levelled out. Is that the effect that The Budget has on the job market? Some kind of stability? Probably.

Anyhoo, that's it for this week. Good luck with the job hunting.