Which Areas Have Seen the Biggest Growth in Employer Demand This Year?

There have been many stories in the media recently about the recent rise in employer demand for jobs, and that many employers are finding it really difficult to fill those places.

What we want to do in this piece is to take a look at where this growth in demand is taking place, and whether there are any areas of the country that are showing particularly strong or low growth.

We can begin by looking at demand across the 12 Government Office Regions, which you will see in the chart below.

We have plotted total job postings (Y-axis) vs percentage change (X-axis) from January to September, and as you go through the months it is immediately clear that although there was a drop in demand across most regions in February, since then it has been fairly solid growth, with a particularly strong surge in May as the Hospitality industry started to open up again.

It is interesting to note that throughout the year, the highest percentage growth in demand has been in the three devolved Governments, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland seeing 59%, 58% and 47% more job postings respectively since January (the North East also saw 47% growth).

By contrast, the lowest growth has taken place in London at just 18%, possibly a reflection of the fact that many people haven’t returned to working in the office, which will have had a knock on effect on a number of sectors there, including Hospitality and Retail:

We can also delve deeper to look at growth at the Local Authority level. In the interactive table below, we have listed all Local Authorities in the country* and their respective Government Office Regions, with absolute change in job postings throughout the year, the percentage change this equates to, and a ranking based on that percentage (*we have left out the Isles of Scilly, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, and the Shetland Islands as the numbers of postings are very small and so any rise tends to skew the data).

You can use the search box at the top to filter by Region or Local Authority, and click on any of the headers to sort by ascending or descending order.

To see the Percentage Change for an area, hover your cursor over the bars.

At the top of the chart you can see a number of Local Authorities from the devolved Governments. For instance, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have three areas in the Top 20:

• Scotland: West Dumbartonshire (155% growth), Highland (97%), and East Renfrewshire (95%)
• Wales: Bridgend (106%), Pembrokeshire (104%), and Monmouthshire (90%).
• Northern Ireland: Newry, Mourne and Down (138%), Mid and East Antrim (101%) and Fermanagh and Omagh (92%)

At the bottom of the table, there are seven Local Authorities that have seen a decline in job postings throughout the year, and three of these are in London:

1. Lambeth (-21%),
2. Wandsworth (-15%), and
3. Redbridge (-10%)

Again indicating that employer demand has taken a harder hit in the capital than in many other areas of the country: