OVI for October 2020: Labor demand stagnates, but additional bricklayers wanted

OVI index for October 2020 shows that labor demand dropped by 21.5 percent compared to the same month last year. Such indicators have already been present for several months: after a dramatic fall in April and May, labor demand in the following months became stable between 75 and 80 percent of the 2019 demand. These data show that complete recovery of the labor demand market is still out of sight and that labor demand has reached a has reached a plateau.
 
When looking at occupations in demand in October of this year, compared to the same month last year, there is still a relatively strong demand for occupations related to the construction sector, due to the earthquake in Zagreb. Demand for bricklayers increased by 72 percent, while demand for construction engineers rose by 21 percent. The rise in the demand for occupations from the construction sector is particularly visible in Central Croatia, where year-on-year demand rose by 83 percent for bricklayers, 28 percent for construction workers and 7 percent for construction engineers.

 

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.