OVI for November 2018: Strong growth in demand for doctors and nurses

December 4, 2018

In November, the OVI index rose by 16.9 percent compared to the same period last year. Seasonally adjusted index values also point to growth on a monthly level, by 3.3 percent. Although labor demand (based on the online index of job advertisements) indicated a slowdown in certain months of this year, growth in the average index value by 26.6 percent in the first 11 months of 2018, compared to the same period last year, suggests that labor demand grew strongly this year as well. It seems that economic recovery, coupled with the strong emigration of working age population, makes it difficult to fill-in the newly opened job positions quickly, so the number of online job advertisements is expected to continue rising.
 
The most sought-after occupations in November, accounting for over a fourth of all job advertisements, were sales assistants, waiters, cooks, and bookkeepers, while compared to the same month last year, teachers were replaced by doctors and dentists on the list. Moreover, the number of vacancies for doctors and dentists, which accounted for 3.6 percent of all job advertisements in November, rose by more than 210 percent compared to the same month in 2017, while in the first 11 months of 2018 demand for doctors and dentists rose by 35 percent. Considering that the number of job advertisements for nurses grew in the same period by somewhat more than 12 percent (and nearly 70 percent in November), we can conclude that there is a serious demand for labor in the healthcare sector, probably caused by emigration of employees from this sector.

 

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.