The sectors where jobs are growing
New figures from a leading recruitment consultancy show how events in the wider economy are affecting employment in different sectors.
Although unemployment continues to rise, recruitment firm Reed’s Job Index has found that the number of full-time jobs available via its website increased by 17% in December 2011 compared to a year earlier.
Here’s a breakdown of the sectors with the highest annual increases in job opportunities, according to Reed's latest figures:
|
Sector |
Annual increase 2010-2011 |
|
Motoring and automotive |
82% |
|
Engineering |
60% |
|
Hospitality and catering |
43% |
|
Leisure and tourism |
43% |
|
IT and telecoms |
41% |
| Energy | 39% |
|
Construction and property |
35% |
|
Qualified accountancy |
29% |
|
Estate agency |
28% |
|
Charity and voluntary |
25% |
|
Human resources |
25% |
In terms of the areas where the number of opportunities fell fastest, unsurprisingly the public sector and some of its associated sectors – notably education and social care – showed big annual drops.
There were also falls in banking and financial services, again unsurprising given the number of large companies making redundancies during 2011.
What's happened to salaries?
Salaries have remained flat overall over the past 12 months. The biggest increases came in financial services, recruitment consultancy and estate agency, plus security and safety, suggesting commission-led sectors are still willing to pay out. Salaries dipped the most in the retail, reflecting the current turmoil on the high street, legal, charity/voluntary and strategy/consultancy sectors.
Looking at job opportunities by region, the biggest annual increases in vacancies were in London and East Anglia. Only Northern Ireland showed a drop in vacancies, but there was only very minor growth in Wales, Scotland and north-west England.
When it comes to salaries, Reed reports no annual increase across the UK as a whole. However, salaries grew by 5% in East Anglia, 3% in the West Midlands, 2% in Yorkshire and Humberside and 1% in the south east. Wales and the East Midlands experienced the biggest falls.
More: Six top ways to get a pay rise in 2012 | Rules to make you richer at work | How to write the perfect CV
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A possible explanation for the apparent contradiction of increasing jobs and increasing unemployment is the concept of misallocation of resources. This theory is provided by the school of Austrian economics. It is the idea that government involvement in the economy causes resources to go where they are not needed, as a consequence you get the contradiction where the market signals the desire for more engineers but you get more philosophy graduates instead. You could also call it opportunity cost. people who spent time working for the NHS or studying for a humanities degree are actually needed in the engineering sector or wherever. Its not for me, as a theoretical omniscient bureacrat, to say where workers are needed. It is the market which decides. Put simply get the government out of as much of economy as possible. Get oligarchical sectors broken up.
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Is 'volunteering' a job opportunity? I'm not dissing volunteers; far from it, I just want to know if the entry for 'chairty and volnteering' consists of all those things that used to be paid for and now rely on volunteers (librarians and classroom assistants spriing to mind)
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It seems strange that unemployment is going up according to the ONS but these figures suggest that there are a lot more vacancies; it doesn't appear to make sense. This video from the ONS paints a more plausible picture - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edXoPPqKFkI
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30 July 2012