OVI for January 2021: Labor demand one third lower than in January 2020
February 2, 2021
Labor market at the beginning of 2021 still proves to be under the strong influence of the COVID-19 pandemic and measures designed to curb the pandemic. OVI index for January 2021 shows that labor demand was 33 percent lower than in January 2020, which is the biggest drop since May 2020, caused by stronger restrictions of the economic activity. Labor demand for occupations in the service sector, which are traditionally the most sought after – sales person, cook and waiter – was 54, 76 and 90 percent respectively lower in January 2021 than in January 2020. However, some occupations recorded a significant increase in demand, so that the demand for teachers, medical doctors and dentists was double than the demand in January last year, while the demand for construction and mechanical engineers rose by 64 and 20 percent respectively. With regards to the type of contract, it is noticeable that demand for student and seasonal jobs dropped the most, by as much as 72 percent, while fixed-term and permanent contracts dropped by a quarter compared to January 2020.
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.