Studying the UK Job Market During the COVID-19 Crisis with Online Job Ads

TL;DR

This study analyzes UK online job ads during COVID-19 to reveal sector-specific impacts, geographic variations, and changes in job characteristics, providing a rapid, open methodology for real-time labour market assessment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel methodology combining topic modeling and geo-inference to analyze online job ads for real-time labour market insights during COVID-19.

Findings

Vacancies dropped by 60-70% during lockdown

Recovery was partial, with over 40% deficit remaining

Sector-specific impacts varied, with hospitality and graduate jobs most affected

Abstract

The COVID-19 global pandemic and the lockdown policies enacted to mitigate it have had profound effects on the labour market. Understanding these effects requires us to obtain and analyse data in as close to real time as possible, especially as rules change rapidly and local lockdowns are enacted. In this work we study the UK labour market by analysing data from the online job board Reed.co.uk. Using topic modelling and geo-inference methods we are able to break down the data by sector and geography. We also study how the salary, contract type and mode of work have changed since the COVID-19 crisis hit the UK in March. Overall, vacancies were down by 60 to 70\% in the first weeks of lockdown. By the end of the year numbers had recovered somewhat, but the total job ad deficit is measured to be over 40\%. Broken down by sector, vacancies for hospitality and graduate jobs are greatly reduced, while there were more care work and nursing vacancies during lockdown. Differences by geography are less significant than between sectors, though there is some indication that local lockdowns stall recovery and less badly hit areas may have experienced a smaller reduction in vacancies. There are also small but significant changes in the salary distribution and number of full time and permanent jobs. In addition to these results, this work presents an open methodology that enables a rapid and detailed survey of the job market in these unsettled conditions and we describe a web application \url{jobtrender.com} that allows others to query this data set.