OVI for August 2018: Job advertisements seeking doctors double in number

In August 2018, OVI registered a 17.1 percent growth when compared to the same month of the previous year, which is―after the 10.8 percent in July―the lowest growth rate registered in the past year. The growth rate of the index has been decelerating since May indicating thereby a high base effect, which means that for the last year at least, labor demand remained at a high level inducing therefore somewhat lower annual growth rates when compared with the previous period. Nonetheless, when compared with July, seasonally adjusted index achieved the growth of 7.3 percent, which means that, in the short term, labor demand increased again as the tourist season began approaching its end.

When comparing the most sought-after occupations with those from August 2017, occupations registering the biggest increase in demand, such as those of doctors/dentists, workers in manufacturing, and designers doubled in number. Following with an increase of 93.3 and 68.8 percent were job advertisements seeking professors and cleaners. On the other hand, occupations such as mechanical engineers, clerks, tourism professionals, programmers, and cooks registered a drop in the number of advertisements on an annual level, ranging from -12.7 percent for cooks to -25.0 percent for mechanical engineers. Considering the start of a new school year, August registered an increase in the number of job advertisements seeking professors and teachers by as much as six times when compared with the previous month.
 

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.