OVI for October 2024: Labor demand drops by -3.8 percent in the first 10 months

November 5, 2024

In October, the OVI index fell by -7.2 percent on an annual level, which is the third consecutive month that the index has been falling. Seasonally adjusted figures also show that the OVI index has decreased, by -1.8 percent compared to the previous month, after a 2.2 percent growth in September and a cumulative drop of -2.1 percent in July and August. Considering such a start to the last quarter of the year, we can expect the entire 2024 year to end in the red, i.e., with a decreased demand on the labor market compared to 2023. In the first 10 months of this year, the index dropped by -3.8 percent in total compared to the same period last year.

Compared to October 2023, the occupations of salesperson, teacher, warehouse worker, and waiter remained among the five most sought-after occupations, but bookkeepers pushed out cooks and came in fourth on the list. The largest drop among the most sought-after occupations was recorded for telecommunications staff, who fell from 18th to 25th place, while the biggest growth was recorded for professors, who jumped from 33rd place a year ago to 17th place in October 2024. The biggest contribution to the job advertisement growth rate came from advertisements for professors and nurses (a total of 1.5 percentage points), while the biggest negative contribution came from advertisements for cooks, waiters, construction workers, telecommunications staff, and hotel/hospitality staff (a total of -3.6 percentage points).

The share of job advertisements seeking secondary level of education fell by -0.8 percentage points to 55.6 percent over the year, while, at the same time, those requiring higher levels of education increased by 1.5 percentage points to 31.5 percent. Most job advertisements (57.5 percent) offered permanent employment, rising by 6.3 percentage points compared to October 2023. All regions except the southern Adriatic recorded a decrease in the number of job advertisements on an annual level in October, with central Croatia recording the biggest drop, by as much as -9.3 percent, while the southern Adriatic recorded an 18.1 percent growth. The biggest contribution to the drop in number of job advertisements in central Croatia came from advertisements for cooks, teachers, and construction workers, while the biggest contribution to the growth in number of job advertisements in the southern Adriatic came from advertisements for teachers, professors, and nurses.

 

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 2020). 

The index is to be interpreted in such a way that the values greater than 100 represent growth when compared to 2020, and accordingly, that the values less than 100 represent a decrease with respect to the base year. The index is seasonally adjusted using the X-12-ARIMA method.