OVI for September 2019: Most of the advertisements for jobs of limited duration
October 4, 2019
OVI index in September registered growth on both annual and monthly levels. The index rose by 2.4 percent compared to September 2018, while seasonally adjusted index values point to an even more significant growth of 4.6 percent compared to the previous month. What followed was a demand for labor on the Croatian job market which rose, according to the OVI index seasonally adjusted values, cumulatively by 5.9 percent in the third compared to the second quarter. However, due to lower labor demand, measured with published online advertisements, on both annual and quarterly levels in the second quarter, average OVI index value in the first nine months of this year is 0.6 percent lower compared to the same period in 2018. This situation is in line with movements of the overall economic activities which, according to the CEIZ index, seem to have accelerated at the beginning of the third quarter after having slowed down in the second quarter.
Same as in September 2018, the most sought-after occupations in the previous month were that of a sales assistant, teacher, waiter, cook and warehouse worker, which made up almost 35 percent of all published advertisements. However, the number of advertisements for waiters decreased compared to September 2018, so that teachers ended at the second place of the most sought-after occupations. Considering the start of the new school year and certain changes in the educational system, it is not surprising that the demand for teachers has somewhat increased.
On the other hand, growth in the number of advertisements offering fixed-term employment, together with stagnation of the number of advertisements for permanent employment, shows that the majority of jobs being offered are still for a fixed-term. Higher demand for occasional, seasonal and student jobs also points to this, while the number of advertisements offering employment through occupational training continues to drop. The number of job advertisements offering fixed-term employment amounted to somewhat more than 50 percent of the overall number of published advertisements in September, while contribution of these advertisements to the annual index growth of 2.4 percent accounted for 2.4 percentage points. Contribution to the annual index growth for student, occasional and seasonal jobs accounted for 1.3 percentage points, while contribution to published advertisements for employment through occupational training was negative and amounted to -1.2 percentage points.
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.