Job vacancies update - 21-MAY-2009

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

Total vacancies in the UK 383,170
Down -5.58% from last week
Up 0.87% from last month
Down -21.28% from last quarter

Here's your regular graph showing how many job vacancies are listed on reed.co.uk and the Job Centre Plus. A wee caveat about the JCP is that the total jobs listed on their site is updated in real time, so it varies depending on the time of day, contrast this with Reed who update their total daily. Also now included is information from Monster.co.uk, which is a rolling figure for the past seven days.


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 for vacancies in the UK.


So we're down a bit from last week, but still not as low as at the start of the month. Is this the result of the government's efforts to find jobs for the ever increasing armies of unemployed?

Anyhoo, looking now at the sectors which have growing number of vacancies compared to last month:-

Leisure and tourism 28%
Motoring and Automotive 16%
Transport and logistics 13%
IT Contractor 10%
Admin 9%
Hospitality 9%
Retail 9%
Public Sector 9%
Temp 8%
Social Care 8%
Human Resources 7%
Sales 6%
FMCG 6%

The worst performing sectors are

Scientific -5%
Health -6%
Strategy and consultancy -8%
Training -22%

I wonder if there's a nicer way I can display all this information.

That's it for this week. Good luck with the job hunting.

Baws deep in SQL once more

So, I've installed XAMPP and I'm pretty sure it all works. I've got PHP & MySQL for Dummies on my lap and a spreadsheet with all the MPs expenses and majorities data.

I used to dabble with SQL in my last job, using Open Office Base to try to create an MRPII system, but that was six months ago, things are different now.

So I've got me one new table, which looks a little like this:-

ID	Name	Attribute	Value
1	Afriyie, Adam	Constituency	Windsor
2	Burns, Simon	Constituency	Chelmsford
3	Cameron, David	Party	Conservative
4	Streeter, Gary	Constituency	Devon, SW
5	Abbott, Dianne	2005 Majority	7427
6	Wyatt, Derek	Expense fiddle link	http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5330808/Labour-MP-Derek-Wyatt-billed-75p-for-scotch-eggs-MPs-expenses.html

I think keeps it all kind of simple, rather than having to add columns or create new tables everytime something new happens. Its probably some technique they teach you in first year database management, I swear I read some techy article about this sort of way of arranging databases years and years ago.

Anyhoo, whilst its easy to do a wee

SELECT Name, Value FROM mpinfo WHERE 'Attribute' = 'Constituency' ORDER BY Name

or

SELECT Name, Value FROM mpinfo WHERE 'Attribute' = 'Party' ORDER BY Party, Name

to get lists of each homogenous atrribute. I'm wanting to display a table which has columns for 'MPs name', 'Constituency', 'Party' and whatever else.

Lazyweb, can you help?

It should simply be a case of joining the results of the two previous SQL queries

SELECT Name, Value FROM mpinfo WHERE 'Attribute' = 'Constituency'
LEFT JOIN
SELECT Name, Value FROM mpinfo WHERE 'Attribute' = 'Party'
ON Name=Name

But that's clearly not going to work, so can I run an SQL query that creates two new tables, one for each of the previous queries, then joins them, spits forth the desired information, and then drops the tables.

And can I do this within phpMyAdmin?

Photobomb plague

I was bored, and thought I'd play around with PhotoShop.

I'm sure I've seen this sort of thing before, or did I dream it.

Just used a random pic off of the internet.

We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 5)

The problem with yesterday's graphs and calculations is the assumption that if an MP's expenses are expensive, then there is something clearly wrong, which is a little flawed.

With the current expenses scandal, whilst public opinion is generally against MPs, its mostly been The Telegraph who are judging which expenses are fiddles and which aren't. Their editorial policy judges what to report. Here's their latest list of all the MPs they've reported on, the ones without links are generally cases where MPs have not claimed, and the ones with links are generally fiddles.

By my flawed counting, there are 136 current MPs who The Telegraph have reproted on.

Carrying on from Mark Reckon's groundbreaking work correlating MPs election majority with how much they fiddle, here is a table of number of fiddles by majority decile.

	Number of reported fiddles	Percentage of reported fiddles
1st decile (smallest majority)	7	5%
2nd decile	12	9%
3rd decile	7	5%
4th decile	13	10%
5th decile	17	13%
6th decile	14	10%
7th decile	13	10%
8th decile	16	12%
9th decile	21	15%
10th decile (largest majority)	16	12%

Lets look at that graphically:-



And once more but with quartiles just to show off that correlation a little more clearly.


So what Mark Reckons already demonstrated the other day still stands with a few more day's worth of data.

I wonder if all three parties exhibit the same behaviour to the same degree...

Party	Conservative	Labour	LibDems
1st quartile (smallest majority)	6	13	2
2nd quartile	10	20	1
3rd quartile	9	22	3
4th quartile (largest majority)	16	17	7
Total Fiddles per party	41	72	13
1st quartile (smallest majority)	15%	18%	15%
2nd quartile	24%	28%	8%
3rd quartile	22%	31%	23%
4th quartile (largest majority)	39%	24%	54%

And graphically...

Crikey!

It looks like Labour buck the trend amongst the three largest parties, their safest MPs haven't been outed by the Telegraph as much as safe Tories and LibDems.

It could just be that The Telegraph are being selective as to whilst MPs the cover, or maybe safe LibDem MPs really are twice as likely to fiddle their expenses as safe Labour MPs.

We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 4)

Are they all the same? Are they as bad as each other? Is bad even the right word or is there something in their nature?

Politicians that is.

I'm still playing around with the expenses versus majority spreadsheet, my mind boggles. In lieu of having a job and any other productive thing to do with my time, I'm in the Brioche cafe in West Hampstead, I've had one cappucino, one hot chocolate, a glass of water and some apple and toffee pie and I've got some cool new graphs.

We've previously shown that in the great scheme of things MPs with very safe seats, with huge majorities tend to claim a little more in expenses than average and MPs with unsafe seats and very slim majorities tend to claim less than average.

But there are different types of MPs, some of them are Red and some are Blue, Labour and Tory. Now historically Tory folk have been rich land owning upper class and Labour folk are from the working class, so you'd kind of expect Tory folk to not claim much cos they don't need to and Labour folk to claim everything they can because they don't need to.

I'm not sure what to expect of the LibDems but hey, lets look at the graphs.

The old scatter graph still doesn't show anything clearly, its just a big noisy Jackson Pollock style thing. We've ranked all the MPs expense claims and ranked all the majorities, and plotted it with colours representing the parties.

If you squint, you can see that the orange blobs, representing LibDems, they seem a bit sparse the further you look to the top right. But other than that, I see nothing significant.

So let's do those quartile bar chart things for each of the parties.



Crikey!

I know what you're thinking, and you're right.

The graph for Labour shows some kind correlation. But right now, my head is mush, and I can't work out what it means.

We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 3)

Was there a point in me doing the table in the previous post? I don't recall, it took me ages and I lost track of my intentions.

Right, Mark Reckons, he's got all the MP's expense totals ranked and all the majorities ranked and he's done some quartile graphs that show a correlation, the more secure the MP, the higher their majority, then the more likely they are to claim huge expenses.

I've run pretty much the same data and here's a scatter graph with majority rank along the bottom and expense rank is along the side.

It ain't a straight line as MarkWadsworth predicted in a comment the other day. But MarkReckons found a correlation, and I'm going to find it too. You just can't see it from a noisy scatter graph thing.

So, my next graph shows the correlation in deciles, I guess they're like the quartiles of Mark Reckon's chart, but there's ten intervals instead of his four.

You can see there's a bit of a correlation, one end's lower than the other, but in the middle its all a bit wibbly.

So I guess, validating Mark Reckon's conclusions, the MPs with the biggest majorities are most likely to claim the most expenses, and the MPs with the smallest majorities are likely to claim the lowest expenses. And all the MPs in the middle, they're all wibbly.

We're from the internet, we're here to help (part 2)

Hi, my name's Chris, I am unemployed, I studied manufacturing engineering at university. We did one module in statistics, but now most of what I do it based on looking at what other people have done, scratching my head and thinking "I could do that".

A few days ago I swear I saw online a blogpost where someone had done a wee table with how many MPs had had expense scandaly things written about them in The Telegraph, and what proportion were Labour, Conservative and so on, I can't find that post now, so I made up the table myself, using data from The Parliament expenses pdf, stuff on Mark Reckons and The Telegraph's full list.

Party	No. Expense MPs	Total MPs	Percentage
Labour	60	258	23.26%
Conservative	37	188	19.68%
LibDem	12	153	7.84%
DUP	2	9	22.22%
SNP	3	6	50%
SF	5	5	100%
SDLP	0	3	0%
UUP	0	1	0%
PC	0	1	0%
Ind	0	1	0%
KHHC	0	1	0%
Ex-Conservative	1	1	100%
Respect	0	1	0%

Crikey, it took me ages to make that table, damn this crappy 'puter, and bah for not remembering where I saw the original table.

Job Centre rant of the day

Every fortnight we trudge along to the Job Centre Plus, clutching to our chests our 'Looking For Work' booklets, inside scrawled the six 'job search steps' we've taken, six jobs applied for, or agencies visited or websites signed up to.

As agreed to previous, for ten minutes before our Job Centre Plus signing on appointment, we play on the Job Centre Plus computer terminals, searching for job vacancies with potential in the surrounding area. Screening officers, Air Conditioning Engineers, Sous Chefs, Database Analysts, Assistant Audiovisual Technician, Student Office Assistant, Watch Technician.

For almost every job on the database, when you click through for more details and the job description, the text box starts with the phrase:-

Description
This Local Employment Partnership employer shares
information about new starters with Jobcentreplus, for
statistical purposes only. See www.dwp.gov.uk for more
information.

Before going into details about the job itself.

Why? Why must I read this when trying to find about the nature of the job, any job, must I read the same information?

I'm guessing it was some guideline as a result of data-protection legislation, which has been implemented without fail on all applicable jobs.

Someone somewhere thought it was a good idea, but now it clutters up the job descriptions on the Jobcentreplus database.

Its inefficient, the same sentence copied and pasted hundreds of thousands of times.

Read with indifference by millions of job seekers every day.

For no good reason.

Read it again

Details
This Local Employment Partnership
employer shares information about new
starters with Jobcentreplus, for
statistical purposes only. See
www.dwp.gov.uk for more information.

Has your life been enriched? Are you any closer to getting a job? Do you feel like your data has been protected?

Where are the damned statistics? I've wasted seconds of my life reading these dame lines over and over again.

Details
This Local Employment Partnership
employer shares information about new
starters with Jobcentreplus, for
statistical purposes only. See
www.dwp.gov.uk for more information.

From the internet

We're from the Internet, We're here to help.

In the wake of the MPs Expenses row, “The Troughalypse” if you will, Uncle David is starting to put all the shadow cabinet's expenses on the internet, on GoogleDocs, in real time.

I think this sort of thing is great, it means someone with a bit of knowhow can set up a twitter bot or some kind of script or anything to process the information in real time. A widget to sit on your blog clocking up the cost of your local MP, easy. Subscribe to the PM's expensebot on Twitter, no problem.

This is what the future should look like.

See something shady, you can ping it up on blogs, twitter, facebook anything and in seconds some poor soul in a constituency office somewhere will be putting out a press release explaining the cost, in real time.

I think this is a little kind of freemarketish, rather than Gordon Brown, David Cam, and Rick Clegg sitting round a table and discussing the reforms needed in the expenses system, and never agreeing. MPs just try anything, lots of different things, and the one which the public likes the best, the one with the most transparency and best visibility, the one that meets with most approval, that solution gets the respective MPs elected.

UPDATE 15:41
Oh, the limitless possibilities of the internet. The Many Eyes wiki thing has the Conservative Expenses data, its got the information arranged as treemaps and bubblecharts and tagclouds and bar charts, and its all interactive and you can click on things for more information and its all live and real and beautiful.

Could this ever have happened if left to The Commons Fees Office? I bet they didn't even know what a treemap is.

Its a beautiful, beautiful way of arranging data.

Job vacancies update - 14-MAY-2009

Crikey, I've been doing this for months and months now, three months in fact. So I can now bring you vague and unreliable data comparing the previous quarter.

Total vacancies are down 15% from last quarter.

Here's your regular graph showing how many job vacancies are listed on reed.co.uk and the Job Centre Plus. A wee caveat about the JCP is that the total jobs listed on their site is updated in real time, so it varies depending on the time of day, contrast this with Reed who update their total daily.


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 for vacancies in the UK.


All right, things have been looking up on the vacancies for the past fortnight now, green shoots indeed.

This graph shows the number of jobs listed in each sector on reed.co.uk. Its pretty difficult to see anything useful on the graph, except the descent of Graduate jobs.


This graph shows the percentage change in the number of vacancies compared with the previous month.


I'm sure you'll agree, its as near as damnit impossible to see anything on the graph. Except for if you squint slightly and see how there a little bit of an upwards trend in the swarm. Sure, most of those lines are negative, but they're less negative than they were, and there's more positive lines.

Anyhoo, the sectors that have the only growing vacancies compared to last month are:-
Actuarial 8%
Admin 5%
FMCG 6%
Hospitality 1%
Leisure and tourism 20%
Motoring and Automotive 11%
Transport and logistics 17%

The worst performing sectors are
Accountancy -15%
Engineering -18%
Strategy and consultancy -34%
Training -21%

I wonder if there's a nice way I can display all this information.
That's it for this week. Good luck with the job hunting.