While most umbrella company contractors and freelance workers are already having a brilliant time, the rest of the UK jobs market may be growing soon.
At least that’s what a recently published research study just aid. There’s ‘new life’ coming back to the employment market according to the Reed Job Index, which would bring some much-needed aid to all those permanent workers out there currently struggling to find a job better than pumping petrol down at the local garage (not that I’m running down garage attendants, mind you – just saying that it’s hard to get a job anywhere right now!). Not only that, but the contract workers out there already enjoying a resurgence in demand for their services are going to be likely to see that demand grow even higher if the research study’s predictions turn out to be accurate.
The Index found that the job market is largely recovered from much of the horrors of the post-recessionary period, which is some absolutely brilliant news. In fact, things haven’t been so good since 2008 according to the Index, though there’s still a long way to go before the economy is booming like it was before the worldwide banking crisis – the troubled EU marketplace is still so uncertain (to be polite) that there’s only so much recovery that can happen while places like Greece and Spain are more or less in complete shambles, after all.
Still, available contracts and vacancies are up by eight per cent from last month’s figures, according to the Index, which is a major jump. Meanwhile, year-on-year growth has been phenomenal in that the jobs market has increased by 17 per cent from June of 2012, so even if things are still not fantastic they’re shedloads better than they were last year.
In fact, 90 per cent of employment markets were found to have increased the number of job or contract opportunities in comparison to last month’s figures. One out of every four had grown their available vacancies by at least 10 per cent, and overall improvement rates across the entire industry was 21 per cent for the entire year.
The most healthy sectors were, once again, the IT and engineering markets, which surprised absolutely no one. Information technology seems to be practically recession-proof, unlike the financial services sector which saw a rather marked decline in comparison to the overall jobs market; the only other sectors that actually experienced a decline were purchasing and accountancy, of all things.
