OVI for October 2018: Highest demand for sales assistants with fixed-term contracts

November 5, 2018

In October 2018, OVI rose by 15.4 percent compared to the same month last year, and after the 10.8 percent growth in July, this is the lowest annual growth rate recorded in the last two years. However, this has more to do with the effect we have already noticed resulting from the high annual growth rate calculation base, which we have been following since July of this year, and less to do with an actual slowdown in labor demand growth rate, as the rate is still very high. Compared to the previous month, the seasonally adjusted index rose by 5.0 percent, which indicates a short-term increase in labor demand.

Comparing the occupations in demand with those in October of 2017, we can see that the largest contribution to demand growth in the past year came from demand for teachers, sales assistants and warehouse workers. With regards to type of contract, the largest contribution to demand growth came from fixed-term contracts, while the highest negative contribution came from occupational training without commencing employment, which decreased in the observed period by 38.2 percent. The most common type of employment on offer in October was fixed-term employment, for the positon of sales assistant, with secondary level of education, in the area of central Croatia.

 

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.