Job vacancies update - October 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

438,228

Up 2.7% from last month
Down 1.1% 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 UK extrapolated out from ONS figures and how each job vacancies agency has changed from day to day:-

Or, perhaps a nicer graph would be this one which has what I've extrapolated is the monthly average, compared to the published ONS figure.

What does it all mean? Well, I reckon my calculations are close enough to the ONS figures to be considered reliable. The ONS get theirs from sending out surveys for a sample of companies to fill in each month. I get my figures from counting actual job adverts.

I'm somewhat sceptical that Gumtree just keeps growing and growing. I figured that maybe they don't delete filled vacancies, and so it just keeps on accumulating, but in some place the number of vacancies is falling, so that can't be right.

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

• Guardian Jobs +0.6%
• Gumtree +6.8%
• Job Centre Plus -5.8%
• Reed +4.9%
• CareerJet +2.6%
  

As I have some really neat in-depth data for each sector on Reed, here are some graphs of declining and growing sectors:-



Out of all the sectors on Reed.co.uk, best performing ones over the last six month are:-

• Manufacturing
• Transport
• Motoring
• Charities
• Apprenticeships
• Banking
• Estate Agency
• Hospitality
• Customer Service
• Retail

I can only speculate on the reasons:-

• Manufacturing is growing due to the poor value of sterling, it helps exports.
• Transport and Motoring are growing sectors because of the government's car scrappage scheme.
• Charities I'm guessing is because of the fakecharity filter, that is charities that depend on public donations have suffered, but those that depend on government money have had constant income.
• Apprenticeships are presumably again promoted by the government.
• Banking and Estate agency, whilst almost dying at the start of the recession the banking sector was bailed out by the government and now they're raking in the cash which huge margins between borrowing and lending rates, which in turn, according to Burning Our Money, is pushing up the property market
• Hospitality, Customer Service and Retail I guess are doing well as a result of both the end of the recession, improving manufacturing and people being more chosy about their purchases, leading to companies providing better service.

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 5.62% in the last month, (from 177,759 to 189,513). 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:-

• London - 2,361 more vacancies (8.74%)
• Glasgow - 909 more vacancies (13.70%)
• Manchester - 804 more vacancies (6.58%)
• Leeds - 495 more vacancies (9.97%)
• Birmingham - 465 more vacancies (5.01%)
• Edinburgh - 438 more vacancies (9.77%)
• Southampton - 436 more vacancies (9.60%)
• Guildford - 417 more vacancies (9.72%)
• Leicester - 377 more vacancies (8.37%)
• Bournemouth - 348 more vacancies (6.17%)

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:-

• Hull - 5 fewer vacancies (-0.52%)
• Ipswich - 11 fewer vacancies (-0.77%)
• Newcastle - 12 fewer vacancies (-0.46%)
• Middlesbrough - 37 fewer vacancies (-3.92%)
• Aberdeen - 42 fewer vacancies (-1.60%)
• Inverness - 53 fewer vacancies (-4.35%)
• Exeter - 55 fewer vacancies (-2.45%)
• Plymouth - 89 fewer vacancies (-5.35%)
• Stoke - 96 fewer vacancies (-8.56%)

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.