Job vacancies update - 17-Jul-2009

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

Total vacancies in the UK 404,941
Up 0.78% from last week
Down 0.33% from last month
Up 1.00% 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. I'm using a rolling seven day average to smooth out weekends where no new jobs are posted.

Except for a drop at the start of each month Job CentrePlus is increasing the number of jobs listed consistently since Budget day in April, whilst Reed is just steady and Guardian has been slowly declining since I started tracking their figures a month ago.

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 of monthly averages for vacancies in the UK.

Elsewhere on the bloggysphere Stumbling and Mumbling has it that as well as the number of unemployed people increasing, there are 5.4 million frustrated workers out there.

If we add these together, there are 5.4 million frustrated workers - those who’d like to work more than they are actually doing. This is equivalent to 17.3% - more than one-in-six - of the labour force.

What’s striking here is that this measure has always been high. Even at the height of the boom, there were almost 4 million frustrated workers - equivalent to 13.5% of the workforce.

And my graphs here show that his final point is correct

Our biggest economic problem is a lack of jobs for those who want them, not the fact that some people don’t want to work.

I was wandering the other day what is the most effective way of creating jobs. Like the government do lots of different things that 'create jobs', but which methods are the most effective? Does spending £1billion on new aircraft carriers create as many jobs as reducing employers National Insurance contribution by the same amount, or raising the income tax threshold, so people have some fraction more disposable income.

Where's there a cost-benefit analysis where job creation is the crucial benefit rather than a cost? And would such a thing innately be inverse to wealth creation?