Jobs concept

Job vacancies in IT up 15% in second quarter of 2014

Trade
Image: Stockfresh

8 July 2014

The IT sector was one of the big winners in the second quarterly Irishjobs.ie Jobs Index for 2014. The number of jobs advertised online from April to June increased by 4% compared to the first quarter and 2%, compared with the same time last year.

The second-quarter Index showed a rise in online job vacancies over Q1 in IT (up 14%); Tourism, Travel & Airlines (up 15%); Legal (up 9%); Accountancy & Finance (up 5%); and Transport (up 4%).

Construction suffered another quarterly drop (-22%) albeit with an annual increase of (+7%) with related sectors like Engineering (-13%) and Environmental Health & Safety (-23%) are similarly affected.

The rise in job advertisements in comparison with the first quarter was spread across the country with Dublin (+16%), Galway (+22%), Limerick (+14%), Cork (+14%), and Waterford (+11%) all benefitting. Year on year, however, only Dublin showed an increase, of (+2%), confirming other findings that the economic recovery is taking place largely in the capital.

University of Limerick economist and author of the report Stephen Kinsella said: “The Jobs Index is calculated relative to the second quarter of 2009, which was a low point for the Irish economy in terms of job creation. This quarter, our index indicates that we are 59% above the number of jobs advertised in that period.
Since the Jobs Index quarter (Q2 2009), many sectors have been performing well, culminating in what we now see as steady growth.

“The Irish economy is still struggling to pull out of the initial phases of its recovery from a financial crisis, in terms of total domestic demand, employment levels, and credit, advanced not to banks or for property, but just into the real economy. The unemployment rate has dropped to a five-year low at the still unacceptably high rate of 11.6%. We see a positive movement overall in this quarter, but the recovery is slow to start. The flow of credit, in particular, is negative again, meaning we are seeing a ‘creditless’ recovery.”

Kinsella concluded: “The Irish economy is in a relatively fragile state, but employment is recovering, with domestic demand lagging behind it. Both IBEC and the ESRI predicted we would have 50,000 new jobs in 2014. So far it seems we have approximately 1,700. The positive predictions from April that Ireland’s economy will expand by 3.5% this year on the back of a resurgence in domestic demand and in exports, seems at variance with the evidence we have from the IrishJobs.ie Jobs index. Credit growth is still not taking place, which makes the increase in job advertisements noted in this report all the more remarkable. There is also evidence of the faltering of the building sector’s recovery, which may well be related to the lack of credit in the economy.”

TechCentral Reporters

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie