Global Job Market Analysis
A lot has changed in the last few months since COVID struck us. While countries across the globe have mandated lockdowns, it has severely impacted economic growth. Global job market analysis states that about 10 million US workers have already lost jobs, and a similar trend seen across geographies. As per this UN labor agency report, half of the global workforce is at risk of job loss due to the pandemic. There’s also this eerie feeling that there could be more deaths due to lack of wages, thus impacting livelihoods than the disease itself.
We delved into the data feeds generated via JobsPikr since March 2020 and compared that to the jobs posted during the pre-COVID era through job data visualisation. Below are five key takeaways.
1. Number of New Jobs have Decimated
During Jan 2020, around 7M new jobs were created, which only increased from Feb’20 to 11M. This number has reduced by more than 90% to a mere 1.3M during March as well as April. It was obvious, since most companies currently are in survival mode, with frozen hiring and inevitable pay cuts and layoffs. We don’t know how many of those would see the light of day. As per a CII poll, 52% of firms expect job losses due to COVID. But of those that are hiring, most of them are the ones who have seen an increase in demand viz healthcare, delivery and logistics, FMCG, and the likes. We’ll leave this analysis for another post to dig further into the company profiles that are currently hiring.
2. Full-Time Jobs Saw a Sharper Drop than Part-Time or Contract
Full-time jobs saw a sharper drop than a part-time or contract job. It seems logical since most companies are further optimizing their operational efficiencies in an attempt to increase cash flows.
It’s interesting to note that full-time jobs still constitute the larger share of new jobs created, and there are slightly more contract jobs than part-time.
3. Healthcare has Taken the Top Spot from Administrative Jobs Category
Global job market analysis states that the maximum number of jobs pre-COVID was Administrative, followed by Sales and Healthcare. But healthcare and nursing-related jobs have now taken a top spot in the post-COVID phase. Other runners up are Sales, probably because companies are pushing their salesforce harder (not sure if that could be the right strategy), IT, Manufacturing and Customer Service in that order. This order blatantly indicates that organizations had behaved like a sitting duck pre-COVID, but on a positive note, have learned to adapt to the vulnerabilities being more open to investing in IT-related tools.
4. Novel Job Titles have Emerged to the Top of Global Job Market
We were all abreast of the trending job titles related to Data Science and AI pre-COVID. But interestingly enough, since March’20, new job titles like “Housekeeper” (or “Help wanted”) have emerged in the top 10 list, which was not even among the top 50 earlier. Who and what more could one seek out for during these troubled times, when we need to blend work into our homes while doing the chores. Other notable ones that moved upward were Caregiver, Nanny, and Delivery Agent.
In the global job market analysis, jobs that seem to have taken a big hit are the developer titles like Software Developer, Java Developer, Python Developer, and so on. It looks like operational efficiency is indeed the new norm. We expect new titles to emerge as organizations re-equate their WFH policies and new businesses follow.
5. US, UK, and Australia Continue to Lead with the Largest Share of New Jobs
Despite being heavily impacted by COVID with a high number of cases and higher mortality rates, both the United States and the United Kingdom continue to maintain their positions in generating the largest number of jobs worldwide. It is a reinforcement that these economies were better prepared to handle a setback of this scale, will better (and maybe faster) emerge from the ashes than the rest. It’s interesting, how positions have shifted following these top three economies. For instance, South Africa was one of the top 10 job creating nations pre-COVID but has now slid down to the 11th position. Whereas, Singapore is a new entrant in the top 10 spots.
Global Job Market: The Future Ahead
While the scale has changed substantially, individual mixes and positions seem to be largely retained post-COVID. Change in scale attributed to the uniqueness of the situation where unlike other recession periods, no authority is sure of a timeline of resurgence. Most organizations seem to be taking bite-sized steps; quite expected, when they are struggling to make ends meet with huge revenue losses and fixed costs that are difficult to let go.
There are many examples of how inherently agile businesses have revisited their business models and turned fixed costs into variable costs. Multiple tales will emerge out of this trough we are all part of, accompanied by a plethora of learnings, challenging how most businesses run. Our JobsPikr API offers a fully automated enterprise-grade job scraping tool. You can set up and ask for custom requirements using the API. And the data delivered in the desired format
