Jobs 2019 vs 2020 - Is there hope?

Over the past 2 years, I have been keeping a record of Live jobs in the Engineering sector, covering 3 major cities in the UK, London, Birmingham, Manchester +50miles of their Centre. The data comes directly from business websites, and not from Job boards.

It's live jobs at that moment in time, sometimes the figure is affected if the RSS feed of that website change, Like they repost the same job, but its a lot more accurate than job boards, where the same job can be reposted 10 times by the same agency, and track as a new role. But its the same role!?

Also with this data I gathered, one thing needs to be highlighted, due to lock down, I didn't get an accurate amount of information. Infact I got none. Was there No new jobs were posted on the website? Or was it my data collection failed? (It is an automated process). but around the june times, we do see a low build up of jobs, so I suspect its a bit of everything.

2019 jobs - Engineering/Manufacruting 50 miles of Manchester/Birmingham/London

I started collecting this data early 2018, after starting to work out, when jobs are happening. Looking at my revenue, the market seemed to work in waves. But I wanted more evidence. So in 2018, November, I found that there are places you can go, and subscriptions you can have that will collate data for you. How I got these figures, was using an algorithm - that scans companies career pages/job pages - to see what was happening.

The data in a very strange (if you remember) back and forth Brexit year. But still showed how employers focused their recruitment through out the year.

Some of these figures, corolate with the Brexit Political arguments that happened last year, the constant moving of the Brexit end date, but mostly, new jobs were being released just after major events like, Easter, and summer holidays.

Thats what my revenue was starting to show, i thought it was just me, but jobs in the 3 areas of the country, seem to correspond with each other too.

So clearly we have lulls around the summer holidays (not just kids in school, but the time we see people go on holiday). Easter Break, and a burst of work coming at the last 1/3rd of the year. Slowing down for Christmas.

2020 Live jobs, Engineering - Manchester/Birmingham/London - Year to date.

This is obviously going to be a strange one. But I wanted to see if we have any comparison between the years. and surprisingly there are some small comparisons, but a lot of, and obviously different things going on.

I'll point out the 2 obvious things here -

• Start of the year, confidence was high, the market after a Brexit election, gained more confidence - and went into a new year gathering pace. Year on Year, it was still around 30% down on jobs - but the pace was gathering, I remember at the time projecting an almost like for like, Year on Year back in Febuary/March this year.
• Data in Lock down was not recorded, as mentioned above, either my system stopped recording it (which is the likely thing) or no jobs were posted, which might have happened in a number of the companies too. But the increase in June/july, do see an slight raise then fall. (which I will come too).

What can we take from this so far?

Let's look at the glaring obvious. September, this month, Year on Year, jobs are 10% according to this data of that at the same time last year. We saw 700 new live jobs, compared to 80 this year. That is a massive drop of engineering jobs.

But the curve bends down, similarly to last year, which if the trend was to repeat itself - a new flow of jobs could bend this graph back up in October, and then again in November, ready for the Christmas.

The trends are close, I wish this year I had more data - but the trends do repeat themselves even though they are a fraction of each other.

Conclusion

In conclusion - and not to spread doom and gloom here. We are back in a market where jobs are rasing - confidence has got better the past few weeks, and if companies repeat the same way of recruiting last year, we should see increases in jobs in October, and November. But sadly - not the volume we saw last year. And last year was an election year.

What does that mean for 2021?

I think, we will see a similar trend to the start of 2020, with more confidence in the year coming out of winter, hopefully, lockdown measures (what every they are going to be) will be less, and we should see a confident market come back. We also - would hope this sector will see a Brexit deal.

Personally - I am confident a deal will happen, yes, there is more hope than actual knowledge in there, but the factor that will cause unnesseary stress to this sector, equal or more than it did in 2019, or compared to 2020, the trend may be similar. And we may see similar level of jobs.

I want to bring hope here, whenever I say on Linkedin, acknowledging times are tough, and things are looking bleak, the figures show us, that there is hope. Collectively we do do things simular YOY, even in difficult economical situations.

I'll try to see if my prediction is right over the coming weeks, and produce results to see if we are trending the same as last year.

For now, I hope this brings you hope. And I look forward to comments below!