Kids ages and fathers

In both of these stories I'm somewhat concerned by the ages of the youngest children and the relationships with the father.

Miss Essma Marjam: youngest child - 5 months

'I'm separated from my husband. He's a solicitor in Derby, but I don't know if he's working at the moment. He doesn't pay anything towards the kids. Things are quite difficult between us.

Miss Nimco Hassan Ibrahim: youngest child - 4 years

After eight months working as a bus driver, Mr Yusuf began living on benefits. When they were stopped in March 2004, he left the country.

Also I think I'm quite jealous of her TV, Playstation 3 and high speed internet connection.

Both these ladies appear to be taking the piss.

What? £80,000?

Other bloggers have been tearing this blogpost to shreds. Its essentially a business plan for how to do a collectivist Left-wing Local blog.

What sticks out for me most of all is this paragraph on costs:-

My initial workings suggest that a local blog covering a population of 30-40,000 people might be able to survive on turnover of around £80,000 per year inclusive of a living wage for two staff and operational costs, but exclusive of delivery costs (see below) which will need to remain volunteer based in the short term.

Its frankly insane.

Blogging platforms are pretty much free. Blogger, wordpress, Livejournal, even Facebook groups/notes. Sure, you can spend money on a TypePad blog and hosting on your own server somewhere, but its not really necessary, its a vanity thing like getting 7 inches pressed.

And whilst a living wage for blogging alone would be nice, it does suggest that you'll be employing people who don't really want to write blogposts.

Me, I work for little over minimum wage, in London, making sandwiches. The blogging I do for free, because I want to.

The author of the post does go on to cover where the money comes from. Not specifically from the website itself, but

...in the longer term these costs should as far as possible be covered by worker organisations like trade unions (and thereafter a Labour party more open to wider left engagement), the reality is that funds may need to be raised from charitable/employment creation sources (see, for example, this kind of opportunity coming along in Wales), and from very local advertising.

Lets turn this into a bullet-pointed list:-

• Local blog
• Trade Union blog
• Labour party blog
  
• Charity blog
• Employment creation sources (no idea what this means)
• Local advertising

Such a list makes me squint at the screen in confusion and despair. Why would anyone want to read such a thing. Why would a trade union paying for such a thing be in the interests of its members, or a charity for that matter? And just what are employment creation sources?

I like knitting, its a fun diversion, I'm not very good at it, but the end results are pretty neat. I'm currently working on a scarf, its taking me ages. About six weeks so far, not every day mind, but a few hours here and there. One day it'll be finished and I can give it to a loved one as a gift. Someone suggested I could sell it, I could have some kind of knitting business.

This is insane. It takes about fifty hours for me to knit a scarf. At minimum wage that would be about £300. Three hundred quid for a scarf of slightly lower quality that TK Maxx.

There's no way anyone would ever buy from my scarf knitting business, it would never be able to pay its worker.

Likewise, a blog that costs £80,000 would never work.

Okay, maybe it would, such things have happened in the past, sometimes overnight. Very rarely, but sometimes.

But if that's your businessplan, its insane.

Back to the Academies International scam

Its been about six months since I blogged about Academies International, they were an organisation who nabbed my CV off Reed.co.uk and phoned up offering a guaranteed job if I went for one of their training schemes. I went along and merrily signed up to a £9,000 loan taken out on my behalf.

Anyhoo, that blog entry has consistently been really popular, with literally hundreds of folk searching on google for it.

There's a whole handful of websites attached to Academies International now including The Financial Training Academy, The Financial Recruitment Academy, The Business Development Academy, The Vocational Training Academy, The Technology Recruitment Academy, The Technology Training Academy and The Application Development Academy. The sites all look very similar and there's a load of overlap in the people they have leaving testimonials about how neat the company is.

I've been wondering how much these testimonial folk exist in real life, are they on Facebook or google? These are their names:-

• Carley Watson
• Kuldeep Wassel
• Jamal Khan
• Steven Clark
• Scot Williams
• Kazi Jubaer
• John Wright
• Kantilal Tywol
• Rabab Halabi
• Wayne Li
• Abdullah Jama
• Cara Richardson
• Xu Li
• Pete Banks
• Matthew Sulivan
• Fiona Brown
• Sharifa Marshall
• Jennifer Matthews
• Riddhima Moothoo
• Matthew McCarthy
• Jakub Jez
• Neil Turnnidge
• Henry Costa
• Martin Pluck
• Mitchell Hayes
• Joseph Davies
• Sairan Mosadegh
• Ahad Miah

That blog post last summer has garnered 22 comments so far, a record for this blog. Folk sharing their stories, mostly the same deal of phonecall referring to details on an old CV and then offering a guaranteed job.

Its true about what they are saying about the Business development acandamy, or the financial acadamy, or what ever they want to call it. i attended the course for 10 weeks, and i spent more then 8 000 pounds, for a promise i that was lie from the begining. i couldnt belive i fell for such a scam. i am trying my best to get my money back if that is possible. i would want an advice from any one who also a victiem to this crim, if there is any one who has a way to help me to get my money back. i am a 22 year old man who has quite his job, to get a better oppotrunity in the IT field, and now i am flat broke, with no money for food travel or bills. and am struglling to cope with the stress on my mind, if there is any one out there who can help me to do something about it.. i am very upset and i dont have any words to describe how am feeling.

Some people left advice in their comments, this from iyah:-

I contacted the Guardian, and they said I should report it to Consumer Direct on 08454 04 05 06. They will log it and if there are others then this may get picked up by the most relevant Trading Standards Office, but that was the only advice they could give me.

Maybe if we all report them, it will be picked up?

I contacted the Guardian too, but it was a futile gesture.

Rather interestingly former employees of Academies International also left comments:-

i was also a manager until i realised what they got up to there

they are sexist bullies who think employing young women will somehow get men especially to buy

yes it is a load of crap

there are no jobs

and now they are going downhill trust me!! ppl have them sussed now

Job Opportunity

Whilst I love my job, the hours are killing me, the night shifts especially. My whole life for the past fifteen years has been about live music, and I just can't go to gigs if I have to get up for 6am or start/finish work at 10pm, so I've been looking for job vacancies.

Unlike my previous desperate measure of using agencies, I've been checking websites of manufacturing companies I actually want to work for and wandered back to the vacancies page at Linn Products, who I previously worked for from 2002 to 2007 as a manufacturing engineer.

Linn have are advertising the position of Digital Marketing Communications Executive. This is something I'd love to do, but sadly they ask for some appropriate qualifications of which I have none apart from the fact that you are reading this right now.

So I thought I'd demonstrate my complete unsuitability for the job by blogging about it here.

I loved working for Linn, they're a great manufacturing company, they know how to do IT right and they truly believe in what they're doing in high end audio. It still amazes me that the stuff I was doing listening tests with was the best audio quality in the world, me.

Their website has improved vastly since I last checked it, with some rather busy user forums and the MD Gilad having a blog there. He says some interesting stuff to, like declaring that the CD is dead, and streaming is where its at, and how for Linn vinyl is outliving CD.

Whilst the last time I saw Gilad was probably the day they sent us all home, May 2007, the last time I remember seeing him is in the street, down the way from the Alldays in Kelvinbridge. I spied him in the distance, and kind of didn't want to bump into my boss outside work Mr Burns style, I nipped into Alldays to hide. To conceal my true reasons for hiding in the shop I had to buy something and all I could great was on of those huge 1Kg Dairy Milk bars. And so I was nibbling on the corner of it when I wandered back outside again, bumping into Gilad. I ran away muttering something about really needing chocolate.

I could however be confusing Gilad with Colin from The Smittens.


I reckon they're lookalikes. Here, check out this video, same body language and everything.

Crazy stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

So, they were always trying new management things at Linn, Six Sigma and the five S's. They had this neat problem solving scheme where any problem could be classed at N, P or T. Where the solution to the problem was Not within your control, Partially within your control and Totally within your control. I that that was it.

We had weekly appraisal things, where you had to set yourself goals and report on your progress, like learning Python or writing a test plan. One of my goals was to do a company blog, and after months of reporting to my team leader that no progress had bee made, that the marketing team had been blanking me or just gazing blankly when I mentioned the internet, I figured it was actually a T-type problem. Setting up a blog was entirely under my control.

For a week or so, my appraisal progress was going great, traffic to the hi-fi engineer blog was slow, but slowly growing. Until one day I put up some photos a designer had sent me of a new product, the Keel, being manufactured. Its a solid lump of aluminium, machined so that it's the record player armboard and bearing housing thing. When those pics went online the blog started to get traffic from the hi-fi messageboards.

In the first hours first it was a few hundred hits, I could see the locations spreading as daylight hit the continents. When the traffic got into the thousands, I got scared. The marketing folk didn't know about this, they weren't going to be pleased. I tried telling my team leader, but he didn't really get the urgency of the situation, so I emailed higher and higher up the company structure until a message came back for me to shut down the website, make it go away.

I tried, but then the hi-fi forums started to go on about its sudden disappearance.

Oh, the whole episode was a mess.

I got in trouble, it wasn't quite a disciplinary thing cos I'd been quite open about it all, giving regular reports, and asking permission before posting stuff. Its just that I was a lowly test design engineer, trying to do marketing stuff.

And a few months later I was one of the 30% of employees who were made redundant.

And that's why I'm here today, working the night shift at a sandwich factory in Wembley on a Saturday night.

I should be wandering home from How Does It Feel or Little League.

Also, it won't really help that I slung this video up on YouTube of me practising levitation in a demonstration room at Linn. It was a Saturday morning, I had to test a load of 3K-arrays for the Artikulat speakers and I was bored. Then again, the folks at Linn's IP address already know about that one.

On the plus side demonstrating any suitability for the role of Digital Marketing Communications Executive, my blog has more subscribers that their managing director's. (23 subscribers to 7 subscribers). Although I don't for a second imagine that mine gets more traffic, just that mine has more people who want to read it regularly. Yeah, how do you like dem apples.

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.

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.

Saviours of the British economy

A piece on the BBC about how the economy hasn't shrunk by quite as much

The rate of contraction of the UK economy in the three months from April to June has been reduced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Gross domestic product (GDP) has been revised to a fall of 0.7% from 0.8% compared with the previous quarter.

The year on year decline has been revised to 5.5% from 5.6%.

The article has some rather fancy-pants graphs of GDP showing that what we're suffering from right now is worse than what we suffered in early nineties. Anyhoo, I'm not concerned by it, I'm concerned with the line that says...

The ONS said the revision was due to better-than-expected output from the manufacturing, energy, wholesaling and motor vehicle sectors.

What did that better than expected output look like on the job front? Well, here's a graph sprung forth from my google docs spreadsheet of job vacancies

So we can see that from April to June, the manufacturing and motoring sectors did grow, as you'd expect in a busy sector. Manufacturing seems to have declined a bit in July though, and motoring has just kind of leveled out in August.

I only started tracking jobs in the energy sectory in August, so its not too helpful, just showing a decline. Admittedly just checking jobs listed on one website isn't the most authoritative means of collecting numbers, but its better than nowt, and the April-May-June growth is validated.

Job vacancies update - Endispiece

Hi there, my name's Chris, author of ground-breaking attack blog 'illandancient'. Since the middle of February this year, I've been building up a spreadsheet of the number of jobs listed on various websites in the UK, namely:-

• Reed.co.uk (since 16-Feb-2009)
  
• Job Centre Plus (since 20-Mar-2009)
  
• Guardian Jobs (since 12-Jun-2009)
  
• Gumtree (since 8-Aug-2009)
  

On reed.co.uk I've been tracking the number of jobs for each 'sector' and on Gumtree the number of jobs in each region.

This information I've been using to compile graphs and extrapolate figures for the UK which I've been publishing on this website every week or so.

It was an interesting distraction from actually looking for a job. Luckily, I've now found a job and so I'm not going to have so much time for messing about with graphs and spreadsheets.

All the data I've accumulated is now up on this google docs page

With it anyone should be able to conduct their own analysis for whatever ends you have. And able to create such thrilling graphs as this one.

For more authorative information on the number of job vacancies in the UK, I recommend the Office of National Statistics Vacancy Survey here, its updated monthly.

I'll be updating the google docs spreadsheet occasionally, and will still churn out graphs as and when something catches my interest.

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.

Job vacancies update - 13-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

388,831

Down 2.36% from last week
Down 4.17% from last month
Down 11.68% 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.

and here's a graph showing the number of jobs listed on The Guardian's Jobs pages and GumTree's London pages.

We can clearly see that all the agencies are showing steady declines except for the Job Centre Plus. Why oh why? Well, it comes down to money, whilst Gumtree, Guardian Jobs and Reed are out in the real world, struggling through the recession, trying their hardest to round up and advertise job vacancies as best the can to stay in business, Job Centre Plus is getting extra funding from the government, they have increasing time and resources to find jobs to list, 9,000 new staff recruited. Its not so much a sign from the Job Centre Plus that there are an increasing number of jobs out there in the UK, just that they are getting better at listing them.

Its still kind of odd also that the Job Centre Plus has a dip at the start of every month and the other agencies don't.

Having said that, the number of jobs listed at Gumtree London, isn't very representative of the whole of the UK. Whilst London jobs are declining, over the same period jobs in the Midlands have been increasing. I'm going to have to start tracking the total number of jobs listed on Gumtree across the UK, adding up all the regional numbers. It currently stands at around 165,000 jobs, up from 163,000 a week ago.

The other day the ONS announced the latest unemployment figures and in amongst the coverage on the BBC was the stats that in the three months to March the government reckons there were 464,000 vacancies and in the three months to June there were only 429,000. So if I feed those numbers into my great spreadsheet, I can churn out this wonderful graph.

So basing my graph on the average daily changes in each job agency gives me an error of less than 1%. Its nice to be validated like that.

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

It looks like August is a bit crap for job vacancies. Maybe the government are right, and giving the Job Centre more money and resources is a good way to help in the recession, but its not actually creating more jobs, the only thing which will do that is slackening the pressure on employers, to make it easier for them to employ people.

• Lower the minimum wage - I'm unemployed and willing to work for less money
• Cut employer National Insurance Contributions - its a ponzi-scheme anyway the sums will never add up
• Slacken planning permission rules - it should unlock the construction industry just a wee bit
• Revoke IR35 - it penalises contractors and small companies
  

Another thing to consider is that as the number of unemployed people grows and the number of vacancies shrinks, there's more competition for jobs. The level of competition as increased by 50% since January, see:-

So now selecting a suitable candidate from the heap of CVs is just a bit more time consuming for HR departments even if an employer is taking on more staff. That graph's just assuming people only apply for one job. In real life I hear anecdotes about McDonalds getting 10,000 applicants for 100 positions or Toys R Us getting 3,000 applicants for 40 positions. How on earth are HR supposed to deal with an order o magnitude more CVs on the pile? Its not even a wealth creating role in the company, but its drawing in ever more resources.

Moving on, lets look at some pretty barcharts showing the decline of vacancies in some sectors during the recession.

For people who tell me to become a teacher, yeah, we're crying out for teachers...

But not crying out for teachers as much as six months ago.

Engineers, yeah, the UK needs more engineering graduates...

Again, not quite as desperate for them as we were six months ago, likewise for any kind of graduate job...

'Shitting dead rats' would be an apt description of the graduate job scene. Not so bad if you're in accountancy mind...

Still, 50% fewer jobs than in February.

Anyhoo, me, I've got an another interview this afternoon, for a minimum wage job in a food factory. I have 13 GCSEs, 4 A-Levels, a degree in Manufacturing, a long career in high-tech electronics, really computer literate and an IQ of 140.

Must try harder.

Migration of job cuts to the public sector

This here piece on The Register reckons that things are starting to level out for the private sector in terms of job cuts, but for the public sector the future's not so rosy.

The quarterly survey covered 900 employers in all sectors of the economy found some signs of recovery compared to last quarter. The difference between organisations expecting to hire more people and those expecting to cut headcount is -10 per cent this quarter, compared to -19 per cent last quarter. For private firms the situation is even better - the negative balance is -2 per cent versus -30 per cent in the spring.

But in the public sector this figure has slumped from -3 per cent to -28 per cent.

Me, being unemployed and having plenty of time on my hands, I like validating such things, so I had a look at my job vacancies spreadsheet to see if the public sector is cutting the number of job vacancies it has listed.


So aye, the number of vacancies are down from their peak two months ago, but for the Public Sector and Social Care categories on Reed.co.uk, the number's still way above the level they were at in April when the budget was announced.

In the great scheme of things, the number of vacancies is pretty level barely fluctuating by 10% over the past six months. In other categories, Graduate jobs have fallen by 70%, Management jobs by 40% and Manufacturing jobs up 30% over six months.

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.

Spuds

It was about a year ago I had a clear plan. After the thousandth drawing on my Naked Chicks On Post-It Notes website, I was going give it up, buy myself an X-Box 360, with games like Project Gatham Racing, where you get to race round Edinburgh and Stockholm, and Grand Theft Auto 4, where you drive round another city and shoot people too. I'd get the sort of games they play on Penny Arcade. I'd retire in the evenings, to play computer games, safe in the knowledge that I'd done a hard honets day's work.

The plan went to shit when I was made redundant, and since then the future has been too uncertain to make any plan, any aspirations, all put on hold. My self-esteem has gone through the floor. I spend days gazing blankly at job vacancies that require qualifications and experience that I don't have.

I think back to what went wrong, how and why. How did I end up being unemployable?

I could have sworn I was a productive and intelligent member of the human race, but compared to the hundred other applicants for every job, I am a non-person.

My Housing Benefit has been cut, which salves my soul slightly cos I was uncomfortable getting handouts from the state. My Job Seeker's Allowance is gone too, I've reached the end of my contributions based benefits, so now I have no income at all. My car needs a handful of fixes to pass its MOT and my rent is due next week.

I read blogs and blogs about how the UK's going down the pan, and there's nothing I can do about it, I can't even pay for my own existance.

I just wanted to slave away all day, building manufacturing databases, making production just a little bit easier, adding value to a pile of components, making stuff that people want and would pay honest money for. I just wanted to be able to come home from work, and put on Project Gotham Racing and race round cities I used to wander round five years ago.

...

This morning I harvested my potatos

In the supermarket they would cost about 20p.

This is what I have been reduced to.

Job vacancies update - 30-Jul-2009

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

Total vacancies in the UK

410,050

Up 2.18% from last week
Up 2.33% from last month
Up 7.02% from last quarter

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

Its a bit odd, both the Guardian and Reed have had declining numbers of job vacancies listed for the past six weeks, whilst Job Centre Plus have been increasing the numbers of jobs they have. What does it mean, what does it mean? Is it the type of job? The sectors of the employment sphere that each agency covers? The sort of jobs listed at the Job Centre are increasing and the sort of jobs advertised in The Guardian decreasing? Who'd have thought?

If only I could somehow scrap the number of jobs listed on GumTree, how eye-opening that would be, but alas they break it up regional.

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.

Thats it for this week's UK job vacancies update.

Still no jobs for me, bah, etc.