Its a bit of the reed.co.uk recruitment website where they track the total number of job vacancies listed, and provide information by region, sector and also salary levels, showing what sort of jobs they have more or fewer vacancies for. Its updated monthly, and they produce an annual infographic.
You know how I love graphs and infographics, I think its great. Its so easy to read, digest and process. Their information all goes back to December 2009, sixteen months ago.They do a brilliant job of handling the data, far better than I could do by myself.
Regular readers of my online ramblings might have discovered that my previous blog has mysteriously vanished. Some conspiracy theorists would put this down my disregard of injunctions and superinjunctions when blogging about political and legal matters, others may think its some kind of fault with blogspot, or maybe I've made it private and not invited them cos I hate them, or maybe for extreme theorists, I've died. None of this is the case. What actually happened was that I deleted it, cos that's the reckless and crazy kind of guy that I am. You knew that already, right?
An unfortunate side effect of deleting my blog is that now I can't go back and check when I started tracking the number of jobs from the Reed.co.uk website on a ruddy great google docs spreadsheet, and creating rubbish Excel graphs and summaries of the UK's job market. I vaguely remember posting stuff back in early 2009, and then writing update blogposts every month or so whilst I wallowed in unemployment and depression, searching for some way I could become a productive and creative member of society, earning my way in the world, applying for jobs in internet PR and Marketing and anything that would combine my love of spreadsheets and graphs with gainful employment.
According to Reed.co.uk, "The Reed JobIndex has quickly become a respected measure of the state of the UK's job market, being widely reported across the national news media.", they have a long list of press coverage from organisations like the Bloomberg, the Independent and BBC.
I feel a tiny bit bitter that my pioneering work demonstrating the possibilities and the public interest in such data, doing much the same thing as the Job Index but months earlier, has been ripped off with no credit given.
Maybe Chief Executive James Reed is sat in his office off Chancery Lane in London, glorious blue skies outside, he wishes he was out in Lincoln Fields eating ice cream. He glances at the mounds of work, looking at his hourly updates, or the minutes from meetings, he sees that the Reed Job Index has gotten some more mainstream coverage.
He presses the button for his secretary, "Liz, who was it who came up with the Reed Job Index idea?" he asks.
"I'm not sure Jimbo, I think it was that odd one in Marketing who doesn't usually do any work, just reads blogs and checks website traffic" she replies.
"Well give them a pay rise anyway, they deserve it."
"Sure thing Jimbo!"
There's probably a financial value for the Reed JobIndex, and I'm going to carry the thought that some small percentage of that is owed to me.
Sadly, due to me rashly deleting my old blog, I have no way to prove anything. Its all but a twinkle in my eye, a splash on the bathroom floor.
Well, there is of course the google cache, which is a metaphorical discarded tissue, by the side of the bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment