OVI for November 2021: Labor market active despite the pandemic

December 3, 2021

Worsened epidemiological situation did not halt activities on the labor market. For this reason, the latest OVI index values still bring good news as labor demand is above the 2020 and 2019 levels. OVI index for November 2021 shows that labor demand is some 23 percent higher compared to the pre-pandemic November 2019. This is the seventh consecutive month in which labor demand is higher than in pre-pandemic months. The most sought after occupations in November this year were sales person, warehouse worker, waiter, cook and driver. The trend of working from home also continues – the share of advertisements mentioning the option of work from home in November 2021 was around 1.8 percent and these are mostly advertisements for occupations in programming and information technology. Moreover, some 2.7 percent of advertisements were those looking for pensioners, which is in line with an increased demand for pensioners in the past year.

 

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.