Buckinghamshire’s claimant count, December 2018

By Buckinghamshire Business First
22 January, 2019

Buckinghamshire’s claimant count rose by 215 in December to stand at 3,200, the biggest rise in any single month since February 2013.

Buckinghamshire’s claimant count, December 2018 22 January 2019
Buckinghamshire’s claimant count rose by 215 in December to stand at 3,200, the biggest rise in any single month since February 2013. Over the year, the claimant count has risen 11.7 per cent to reach the highest total since August 2014. At 1.0 per cent of working age residents, Buckinghamshire has the 3rd lowest claimant count rate among the 27 county council areas, ranking 2nd lowest among the 38 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). There are 1.7 local vacancies for every claimant in Buckinghamshire, compared to 0.7 across Great Britain.

Table 1: Claimant Count, December 2018

Source: DWP, 2019

There were 5,567 advertised job openings in Buckinghamshire in December, 7.3 per cent (377 openings) more than in November and 4.5 per cent (240) more than in December 2017. The roles most commonly advertised in Buckinghamshire in the year to the end of December have been other sales occupations (2,881 openings), ahead of programmers and software development professionals (2,224); other administrative occupations (2,222); other customer service occupations (2,084); nurses (1,860); marketing and sales directors (1,664); and other managers and proprietors in other services (1,663).

In 2018, 30.4 per cent of job openings in Buckinghamshire were for professional occupations, down from 32.5 per cent in 2017. Although still the most sought occupational group, professionals were one of only two occupations, along with caring roles, to see demand fall. Associate professionals saw the largest increase, with an extra 1,148 openings in 2018, led by the 697 increase in openings for business and public service associate professionals. Jobs in managerial, professional and technical occupations accounted for 59.2 per cent of all openings in Buckinghamshire in 2018 compared to 60.8 per cent across the country as a whole and 71.0 per cent in London.

Over the last year the baseline skills most sought by recruiters in Buckinghamshire were communication skills which were sought in 15,857 job openings, or 22.3 per cent of the total, ahead of organisational skills (7,272); Microsoft Excel (5,946); planning (5,683); and being detail orientated (5,472). The commonly sought specialised skills were customer service (7,961); teamwork (6,530); sales (5,357); teaching (5,290); budgeting (4,381); and project management (3,599).