Job vacancies update - 25-Jun-2009

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

Total vacancies in the UK 411,023
Up 0.46% from last week
Up 4.19% from last month
Down -2.33% from last quarter

Here's your regular graph showing how many job vacancies are listed on reed.co.uk, The Guardian's Jobs pages and the Job Centre Plus. A wee caveat about the JCP and The Guardian is that the total jobs listed on their sites are 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.

Graph a little too messy for you? Try this one of monthly averages.


Its a little better than a last month.

Well, its debateable.

Is having lots of job vacancies a good thing or does it mean that our labour pool isn't skilled enough for the jobs available? Maybe a little bit. Me, I'm unemployed so what I'd like in the world is as many possibilities for employment as possible. The number of unemployed folk in the UK is growing, and I guess they too want lots of job vacancies to apply for too.

I reckon too that lots of job vacancies is also a symptom of companies looking to expand, which is a broadly good thing for the economy in most circumstances. I'll come back to this later, cos in some circumstances, I'm not so sure.

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 21%
Retail 12%
Manufacturing 10%
Legal 9%
Public Sector 6%
Hospitality 5%
Banking 4%
Financial Services 4%
Actuarial 3%
FMCG 3%
Health 3%
Sales 1%
Management 1%
Social Care 1%
Strategy and consultancy 0%
Recruitment Consultancy 0%
Construction and Property -1%
Graduate -2%
Marketing and PR -2%
General Insurance -3%
Temporary Work -3%
Admin -4%
Transport and logistics -4%
Purchasing -5%
Customer Service -5%
Education -5%
Multilingual -6%
Scientific -6%
Charity and Voluntary -7%
Accountancy Qualified -8%
Engineering -8%
Human Resources -10%
Media, Digital and Creative -12%
IT and Telecoms -13%
Accountancy -13%
IT Contractor -18%
Leisure and tourism -27%
Training -32%

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. Lets take a look at some individual sectors.

Me, I'm a manufacturing engineer by training, I get a warm fuzzy feeling in my tummy when I spend all day slaving in a factory to make a pallet full of things that can be sold for more money that they cost to build, that's wealth creation in action, you can see it before your very eyes, in manufacturing.

The line on the graph is at its highest point since I started looking. That is the sign of a sector that wants to grow, and has enough confidence in the future, to employ more people rather than increasing working hours. Sure, its only a few hundred jobs, but its a productive sector, it creates wealth.

A similar story for the automotive sector.

That is a sector that is growing. Aye, some of the car manufacturers are having month long shutdowns and three day weeks, but in other quarters of the sector, I guess, car showrooms and service and pokey wee garages, they're taking on more staff, that's what the graph is telling us.

If you know about cars and find yourself unemployed, there's more opportunities now than there has been in months.

Now, where I'm worried is another growing sector.

The political blogs and Westminster centric types will know about Gordon Brown's dividing line between Labour and the Tories where he's portraying the Conservatives as a party of public spending cuts, calling David Cameron Mr 10% after some think-tank crunched Tory spending statements and figured that in order to protect some chunks, like the NHS, then other chunks will face a 10% cut in their budgets.

The media and most politicios seems to accept that there'll have to be cuts in public spending to make up for the huge debts racked up by the government. One way or another there will have to be cuts in state expenditure spending. Budgets will be cut, departments will receive less money next year than last year.

So, here's the graph of job vacancies in the public sector:-

Its growing. There are more vacancies now than at any point since I started looking three months ago. It doesn't look like the graph of a sector that realises there's going to be less money to pay people with in the future.

Anyhoo, what do I know.

That's it for this week. Good luck with the job hunting.