Job vacancies update - 24-Aug-2009

Good day and welcome to your regular amateur analysis of the UK's job vacancies scene from ground-breaking attack blog illandancient.

Total vacancies in the UK

390,409

Down 5.8% from last month
Down 9.4% from last quarter

Here's a graph showing how many job vacancies are listed on reed.co.uk, the Job Centre Plus, The Guardian's Jobs pages, GumTree's London pages and all of Gumtree's regions added together. I've ripped up the y-axis a wee bit so they all fit, and you can see how much each has changed in relation to each other.

After doing these blogposts for however many months its been, I believe that GumTree is the most reliable site showing the state of the job market. Its the biggest, its compiled by the users, and its pretty cheap so how much money has been ploughed into the site doesn't make much difference. Compared to Job Centre Plus who's acquired 9,000 extra staff or Guardian and Reed who I guess get paid vast amounts of money from the companies who's jobs they pimp.

So GumTree shows signs of growth. Not in London mind, but for the rest of the country the number of jobs listed has increased by around 5% in a fortnight. It will be interesting to see whether it sufferes from the same monthly cycle as the Job Centre Plus does.

So what I do with these figures is I average up the daily change across each site and then modify whatever the Office of National Statistics reckons is the number of vacancies for each quarter. Its pretty accurate, I'm within 1% of what they publish.

So here's a graph showing how the number of job vacancies have changed since February.
If that graph is too prickly for you, here's one with just monthly averages.

It looks like August down a lot for job vacancies.

Not for me mind, in the past fortnight I've had two interviews for real jobs (rather than scams), one of them I cocked up by being late and not the best candidate, and the other interview went fine. I'm going to be working in a factory making sandwiches, pies and soup for minimum wage.

I think sandwich making comes under the sector of Fast Moving Consumer Goods, FMCG on Reed. Its one of the fastest growing sectors for jobs. Maybe in the great scheme of things it means that the UK is becoming a more cost-effective manufacturer than China, or that people are now more willing to take up lower paid jobs to hand make consumer stuff than they were last year.

Anyhoo, here's some graphs showing how the number of vacancies listed on reed.co.uk has changed for the top couple of sectors and for the worst performing sectors, as percentages of their average. So its not so much showing which are the biggestsectors, just which ones are growing quickest.


Its a bit of a mixed bag I guess.

Thats it for this thrilling job vacancies update. I'm going to be busy working from now on so I can't promise much in the way of updates. I'll try to take snapshots every month to get a feel for how things are changing.

Take care space cadets, and good luck.