Job vacancies update - 17-Aug-2009

Good day and welcome to this edition of illandancient's Job Vacancies Update, your regular occasional amateur analysis of the UK's job vacancies scene from ground-breaking attack blog illandancient.

Total vacancies in the UK

417,201

Up 4.8% from last month
Down 8.4% 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.


And here is a graph showing the total number of job vacancies in the US extrapolated out from ONS figures and how each job vacancies agency has changed from day to day:-


What does it all mean? Well, in moments of introspection I figure that the various job websites have different characteristics, constituencies and quirks. Gumtree is the cheapest and easiest site to advertise on, so has the most low paid jobs, Reed only has job vacancies through agencies, and so there's a bit of a threshold for entry, and so on. Some of the websites will overlap, companies advertising the same job on each or even listing the same job twice in overlaping sectors or geographic areas.

For the last few weeks I've been tracking the website CareerJet which appears to have on its books four times as many UK job vacancies as the ONS reckons there are.

Its possible that everyone else is wrong and CareerJet has jobs listed that appear nowhere else, but its unlikely.

Anyhoo, most of the websites show an increase in job vacancies over the last month

• Guardian Jobs +7.0%
• Gumtree +4.27%
• Job Centre Plus +10.2%
• Reed -2.1%

Its would be nice to know where these new job vacancies are coming from. Its a bit of a shame that reed don't have the same rises as the others as I have some really neat in-depth data for each sector on Reed. That data's still kind of useful to see what the world of the future is like, which sectors have declined most that sort of thing. Here are some graphs of declining sectors:-

I think the latter graph explains why I have a degree in Engineering and now have a full-time minimum wage job sweeping floors in a sandwich factory.

The best performing sectors, apart from Transport and Motoring which have been pumped up by the government's scrappage scheme, are Banking and Retail


Banking there having quite a nice bounceback after a terrifying May.

Another sector that's worth having a sly sideways glance at is the public sector, seeing how most of the main political parties are talking about cuts there, and there have got to be some managers in the public sector who are vaguely aware that there's no more money.

It looks like for the past three months there's been a slow and steady decline in the number of vacancies advertised, I believe this is healthy.

From Job Centre Plus, its a bit harder/more time consuming to pull out data for individual sectors, too much clicking, I could only be bothered doing it once. That gave me a neat pie chart showing the UK Job vacancy scene according to the Job Centre.

They have Retail/Sales as the biggest sector, but we can't tell if that's necessarily a growing sector, I'll have to check again in a few weeks so we can compare and contrast.

From Gumtree I have data on job vacancies by region, and its showing some mighty healthy growth, the number of jobs listed on Gumtree has grown by 4.3% in the last month, (from 166,120 to 173,621). Of course it could be that some of the jobs are listed twice where regions overlap, but because we're comparing it to itself, that's just dandy.

Out of the 46 regions on the site, the top ten regions on Gumtree by growth in the number of jobs listed are:-

• Manchester - 638 vacancies
• Edinburgh - 612 vacancies
• London - 592 vacancies
• Glasgow - 486 vacancies
• Bournemouth - 313 vacancies
• Guildford - 301 vacancies
• Reading - 293 vacancies
• Brighton - 271 vacancies
• Dundee - 257 vacancies
• Aberdeen - 233 vacancies

There are some large cities there, so not surprisingly they churn out the greater changes in jobs listed, but Brighton's only a 3.6% change so below average for the site, so another measure would be by percentage increase, which gives the following top ten:-

• Edinburgh +16.0%
• Dundee +15.2%
• Sunderland +12.0%
• Stoke +11.9%
• Derby +10.2%
• Coventry +9.5%
• Aberdeen +9.1%
• Bath +9.0%
• Glasgow +8.8%
• Guildford +8.0%

So Scotland seems to be the place to be for job vacancies, what are they doing different to the rest of the UK?

I understand that this week saw the TUC conference in Liverpool with Bob Crow saying

"Both Labour and the Tories have committed themselves to cuts and privatisation and the trade unions have to take the lead in mobilising resistance and we should start preparing right now, here in Liverpool."

Hmph, whilst Gumtree shows an average increase of 4.3% in the number of vacancies listed, there are a few places that aren't increasing:-

• Bradford - 63 fewer vacancies (-5.1%)
• Liverpool - 31 fewer vacancies (-0.9%)
• Middlesbrough - 26 fewer vacancies (-2.7%)

If Bob Crowe wants to whip up some frustrated unemployed people and mobilise resistance to cuts, Liverpool's one of the few places to do it.

Thats it for this thrilling job vacancies update. All the data I've used here has been ripped by hand from the various websites listed near the top of the post, and for your own enjoyment I keep it on a google docs spreadsheet here.

Take care space cadets, and good luck.