Unemployment statistics show bleak state of the economy
December 17, 2008
The Office for National Statistics has released new figures which show that in the three months to October this year, unemployment rose by 137,000 people. The total figure of 1.86million is the highest level of unemployment for 11 years. As the recession has hit many industries, the number of people claiming jobseekers allowance has steadily increased month on month for the last ten months. The rapidly increasing numbers of people out of work is said to be worrying financial experts, because the unemployment figure is normally a ‘lagging indicator’ in a recession as it takes a while for the effects of a downturn to make an impact on employment. However the fact that the effect seems to have been immediate causes concern for many people, as described by en economist at Deutsche Bank who said “to see so many job losses this early in the cycle is extremely worrying”.
I have noticed changes within my work as a result of the increasing numbers of people losing their employment. In my organisation we are fortunate enough to still be recruiting where others are having to make many redundancies, and in recent months the number of candidates we are gaining from online advertising on sites such as the job centre website has increased massively, when earlier in the year we were much more reliant on recruitment consultancies to find suitable candidates for our roles. Even for quite specialised roles we are seeing an increase in direct applications as there are so many more people competing for fewer jobs. Whilst this may be a good result for companies’ recruitment budgets, it shows a very sad state for the country and the millions of people now struggling to find work. And it seems that younger workers are suffering more than most, as according to The Prince’s Trust, two fifths of people who became unemployed in the last three months were under 25 years old.
The Government is looking to implement a training scheme for unemployed people, allocating £158million in funding to help people who have lost their job to re-train and hopefully find alternative career and employment options.
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