Buckinghamshire’s claimant count, November 2017

By Buckinghamshire Business First
13 December, 2017

Buckinghamshire’s claimant count fell by 30 in October to stand at 2,910 or 0.9 per cent of working age residents, to rank 4th lowest among the 38 Local Enterprise Partnerships and 5th lowest among the 27 county council areas.

Buckinghamshire’s claimant count rate remains less than half the national level despite seeing higher year on year growth than the country as a whole for each of the last 14 months.

Table 1: Claimant Count, November 2017

Source: DWP, 2017

There were 5,148 advertised job openings in Buckinghamshire in November, 197 or 3.4 per cent fewer than in October but 37 (0.7 per cent) more than in November 2016. At the national level, job openings rose 17.2 per cent over the year. There were 1.8 job openings for every claimant in Buckinghamshire in November, well above the 1.0 recorded across the country as a whole.

Over the last year, while the number of job openings has remained broadly similar there have been marked moves within occupational groups. The number of job openings in professional occupations in Buckinghamshire rose by 330 or 26.9 per cent, with openings for managerial and technical occupations also rising, so that in November these occupations accounted for 62.3 per cent of all openings in Buckinghamshire, up from 55.2 per cent a year earlier. The number of openings in sales occupations fell by 86 or 19.2 per cent, while the share of JSA claimants looking for work in these roles rose to 65.5 per cent.

The most commonly advertised roles in November were programmers and software development professionals (244 job openings), nurses (144), other administrative occupations (131), sales accounts and business development managers (113), business sales executives (112), IT user support technicians (105), and marketing associate professionals (102). Over the last year the most sought specialised skills have been customer service (5,922 openings), Microsoft Excel (5,492), business management (3,775), Microsoft Office (3,658), project management (3,201), and sales (3,008). The most sought baseline skills have been communication skills (15,990), ahead of organisational skills (8,895), being detail orientated (4,947), planning (4,877), team work and collaborative working (4,687), writing (4,369), and problem solving (3,353).