OVI for 2018: Highest demand for occupations requiring secondary education

January 4, 2019

Compared to 2015 as the base year, OVI more than doubled in 2018, while in comparison to 2017 it recorded a 25.2 percent growth, indicating a continued strong growth in labor demand. Compared to the pre-crisis year of 2007, the total number of online job advertisements in 2018 was 11.4 percent higher, suggesting that demand in the Croatian labor market is historically at its highest.

As in 2017, the largest contribution to the annual growth in labor demand came from job advertisements seeking low-skilled employees and employees with secondary level of education, while demand for university degree level contributed to the 25.2 percent growth in total number of advertisements with just 1.6 percentage points. This is also confirmed by the top five occupations in demand: similar as in 2017, these included sales assistants, cooks, waiters, and drivers, while warehouse workers came in fifth place, pushing programmers to seventh place on the list. The largest contribution to total annual labor demand growth came from demand for sales assistants, warehouse workers, manufacturing workers, cooks, and bookkeepers.

Advertisements for fixed-term employment were the predominant job advertisement category again in 2018, with their share increasing over the year from 45.4 to 48.6 percent of all job advertisements. Job advertisements for permanent employment grew at a somewhat slower pace than fixed-term job advertisements, accounting for 39.9 percent of all job advertisements in 2018, compared to 41.7 percent in 2017. The number of advertisements for occupational training without commencing employment continued to drop, falling from 4.2 percent of total job advertisements in 2017 to 2.4 percent in 2018.

 

What is OVI?

Online Vacancy Index (OVI) is a monthly index of online job advertisements developed by the Institute of Economics, Zagreb in cooperation with the web portal MojPosao. The index aims to provide timely information regarding current labor demands. OVI index is developed by means of simple enumeration of single new job advertisements whose application deadlines end within the same month for which the index is being calculated. Given that advertisements published by only one web portal are taken into account, the number of job advertisements is expressed as an index (with the base year being 2015). 

The index is to be interpreted in such a way that the values greater than 100 represent growth when compared to 2015, and accordingly, that the values less than 100 represent a decrease with respect to the base year. Index is seasonally adjusted using the X-12-ARIMA method.