Engineering vacancies plummet by three quarters year on year
21 Jul 2020
Advertised vacancies in the UK engineering industry plummeted by nearly 75% in the second quarter of the financial year, thanks to the economic effects of the coronavirus lockdown.
The estimate comes from the online jobs platform CV-Library. It said there was a reduction of 74.2% in Q2 2020, compared to the previous year, with a further 71.4% for the quarter-on-quarter period.
The firm analysed millions of data points from its site for the three months between 1 April and 30 June 2020.
More encouragingly perhaps, the statistics revealed that average pay rose by 6.9% year-on-year, suggesting that organisations are offering fewer vacancies, but with higher pay says the company.
Founder and CEO Lee Biggins commented:
“It’s no secret that lockdown measures stunted the UK economy and labour market during this period. As a result, businesses had no choice but to put a pause on their hiring plans and make difficult decisions about their workforce.
“These figures are pretty bleak and naturally, some industries and locations have been more affected by others. What I can say, however, is that the market is already showing signs of recovery this month, albeit it very, very slowly.”
He added that job applications were down by 11.3% year-on-year. However, when looking at the average application to job ratio in the industry, this jumped up by a massive 220.8% year-on-year. Whereas there was an average 10.2 applications per vacancy in Q2 2019, there were 32.9 in Q2 2020.
Added Biggins: “There’s a lot more competition for the roles that are available. In addition to this, while the furlough scheme has been a life support to hundreds of thousands of businesses, it does also mean that the national employment rate is possibly higher than it should be right now.”
