Job vacancies update - 06-Aug-2009

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

Total vacancies in the UK

391,687

Down 5.48% from last week
Down 0.92% from last month
Up 2.69% from last quarter

Here's a graph showing how many job vacancies are listed on reed.co.uk and the Job Centre Plus. I'm using a rolling seven day average to smooth out weekends where no new jobs are posted.

The Job centre is doing its usual thing of having a dip at the start of the month, but otherwise its a marked incline throughout each month since the budget was announced in April, as opposed to Reed which has been declining at a remarkably consistent rate since the summer jobs blip in the middle of May. Here's a graph showing the number of jobs listed on The Guardian's Jobs pages and GumTree's London pages.

They're both showing declines, its too early to say whether GumTree is just having a month end doldrum and as its just a regional thing I haven't used the numbers there for calculating the bigger UK job vacancies figure...

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.

If that graph is too prickly for you, here's one with just monthly averages.


No much change on the overall picture since April then. If any government wants to reduce unemployment, they're going to have to do something very different to whatever they're doing now.

I'm willing to give the government the benefit of the doubt right now what they say that they've created X hundred thousand new jobs, maybe if they hadn't done the lines on the graphs would be declining more steeply than they currently are, its complicated to prove otherwise. Unless of course you look at how the number of vacancies change in each sector, and compare to how the government's 'job creation' has targeted them.

Now bear in mind that the following barcharts are purely based on jobs listed on Reed.co.uk, which has had declining overall jobs rather than Job Centre Plus with its increasing numbers of listed jobs:-Looking good, that car scrappage thing has kind of helped here.

Kind of okay, just some decline over the past fortnight, could it be to do with the strength of the pund against the dollar, but otherwise a growing sector for jobs.

What's happened to charity jobs over the past fortnight? Is it to do with the government pimping the voluntary charity work over paid charity work?

Finally the banking sector...

Seems to be in rude health, good for them.

Me, I've got an interview this afternoon, so fingers crossed.