From education to employment

Which Occupations Are Seeing a Growth in Employer Demand?

Occupations Seeing Growth in Employer Demand: Shedding Light on the Labour Market #LMI 

In today’s Shedding Light on the Labour Market, we take a look at something a little more positive than some of the negative headlines we’ve been seeing in connection with the labour market in recent weeks. Although we’ve seen a big increase in Claimant Counts across the country since March, and this is expected to rise over the coming months, when we look at employer job postings since the initial Lockdown restrictions were lifted in June, we can see that there has been significant activity.

We can begin by looking at growth in postings during this period across all nine Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) occupations.

In the chart below, we have separated these occupation classifications out according to their broad skills levels, which are as follows:

  • High Skill: SOC 1-3 (Managers, Directors and Senior Officials; Professional; and Associate Professional and Technical)
  • Medium Skill: SOC 4-6 (Administrative and Secretarial; Skilled Trades; Caring, Leisure and Other Service)
  • Low Skill: SOC 7-6 (Sales and Customer Service; Process, Plant and Machine Operatives; Elementary Occupations)

What we can see is that although the highest growth has been in the lower skills occupations, particularly Process, Plant and Machine operatives, there has in fact been good growth across the board:

We can then dig into these high, medium and low skill occupation groups to find out where the highest growth has been in each.

The chart below shows the fastest growth in employer job postings for SOC 1-3 occupations (high skill), and one of the most noticeable increases here is that that of Health professionals, which despite decreasing by -2.7% between June and July, then grew massively over the next two months, such that over period as a whole, unique employer postings for this occupation rose by 82.5%:

The next chart looks at the Top 15 SOC 4-6 occupations (medium skill). Here we see good growth for a number of occupations within the Skilled Trades occupations, such as Painters and decorators (131.8%), Upholsterers (129.7%) and Plasterers (124.3%).

Also noteworthy is the big growth in demand for Library clerks and assistants, particularly between August and September. Despite growing at just 10.5% between June to July, throughout the whole period demand for this occupation increased by 97.5%:

Our final chart looks at employer demand for lower skilled occupations (SOC 7-9), and here we see 13 of the Top 15 occupations showing growth of more than 100% over the three-month period.

Particularly noticeable is the huge growth in demand for Large goods vehicle drivers, with job postings increasing by 175.1% over the period, which may well be a reflection of the growth in online deliveries.

Elsewhere, there also been strong growth for occupations such as Elementary construction (138.6%), and Scaffolders, stagers and riggers (136.4%):

Watch out for the next piece in this regular series on 4th November. 

To find out more about how the crisis is affecting your local area, contact Emsi for more info.


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