In the first blog in this series, we analysed trends in vacancy demand and listed salaries in the UK since 2016. We looked at the huge shifts in demand since the start of the pandemic and discussed the general slowdown which preceded it as well as some seasonal trends. We also noted the likely effect that changes in the composition of vacancies through the pandemic had on the median listed salary.
Then in the second of these blogs, we analysed trends in labour demand across industries. We looked at movements in the human health and social work activities industry, the largest industry in terms of hiring, and the relatively strong recovery of vacancies in the accommodation and food service activities and wholesale and retail trade industries.
And then in the third, we explored further compositional changes by looking at trends in vacancy activity by occupations and sectors. Social Care Workers, despite high levels of interest in the occupation, were the highest demanded occupation since 2016 and through the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, with relatively levels of demand for Warehouse Workers, Primary School Teacher and Teaching Assistant emerging at different points. The IT sector is the largest in terms of labour demand since 2016, whilst the Healthcare & Nursing sector took the least hit through the pandemic.
In this blog, we’ll look at trends in the demand for skills.
To do this, we can use Adzuna’s intelligence portal, our proprietary dashboard that displays a wide range of aggregate statistics based on all the vacancy listings we hold on our site. This allows us to look at the demand for different skills across the UK. Our data is available from April 2016 – covering austerity, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the cost of living crisis – so this is the period that we will consider.
At Adzuna we have developed a proprietary skills ontology initially based on European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) and then supplemented with our own data, which comprises 6,400 ‘parent’ skills. We tag vacancies as demanding a parent skill if they mention any of the wider terms that fit under said parent skill. The table below shows the top 10 demanded skills since April 2016 in the UK. There have been 120,432,000 unique listings over this period, which the proportion of vacancies demanding this skill is calculated from.
| Skill | Demand |
Percentage of all vacancies |
|
Communication |
33,910,000 |
28.2% |
|
Management |
27,921,000 | 23.2% |
|
Clients |
24,866,000 |
20.6% |
|
Customer Service |
17,005,000 | 14.1% |
|
Assertiveness |
15,736,000 |
13.1% |
|
Sales |
15,662,000 |
13.0% |
|
Solutions |
15,484,000 |
12.9% |
|
Engineering |
14,374,000 |
11.9% |
|
Data |
13,403,000 |
11.1% |
|
Reporting |
13,115,000 |
10.9% |
Clearly, communication is key! Nearly a third (28.2%) of all vacancies explicitly ask for communication skills. Looking at the top ten demanded occupations (see the previous blog for full details), communication is demanded most for Customer Service Advisers (45%) and Project Managers (40%), whilst it does not feature in the top ten demanded skills for Warehouse Workers, and only 14% of Lorry river vacancies request it.
Management skills are most commonly demanded of Managers (53%) and Project Managers (42%), whilst client skills are most commonly demanded of Recruitment Consultants (61%). Customer Service skills are unsurprisingly explicitly demanded in 95% of Customer Service Adviser listings.
Looking at highly demanded skills outside of the top ten demanded skills amongst the most in-demand occupations, 90% of Project Manager listings demand project management skills, 72% of General Nurse listings request nursing skills, and 59% of Lorry Driver listings require HGV skills.
Software Developer positions commonly request specific hard skills – 34% request C#, 32% request JavaScript, 27% request Java and 23% request SQL. So to do Warehouse Worker listings – 35% of listings request packaging engineering skills, 22% request transport skills and 21% request Health and Safety skills.
And the skills commonly requested amongst listings for Assistants gives an indication of the duties associated with the role – Microsoft Excel and invoicing are both requested by 23% of vacancies, whilst 22% request finance skills.
Leading up to the pandemic, patterns in demand for the top skills were broadly in line with those outlined above – the top ten remained the same except sales dropped below customer service and assertiveness although the proportion of vacancies demanding sales skills stayed almost the same (actually increasing slightly to 14%), and data and reporting swapped places although again the demand for these skills stayed practically the same. During the pandemic however, there were some larger changes.
The demand for sales and customer service skills both dropped, with demand for both skills dropping by four percentage points with sales falling outside the top 10 demanded skills. Meanwhile, demand for policy skills increased by four percentage points from 7% to 11% as it entered the top 10, as did healthcare skills which increased in demand from 7% to 11%.
The movements in the demand for these skills highlights the changes in the economic activities taking place through the pandemic – customer facing jobs took some of the biggest hits as lockdowns came into force and consumption dropped as people increase their savings for the rainy days ahead, whilst healthcare workers and other key worker roles maintained their activity and remained in demand (the occupations most demanding policy skills through the pandemic include Social Care Worker, General nurse, Primary School Teach, Teaching Assistant, Teacher and SEN Assistant).
Moving out of the peak of the pandemic up to the cost of living crisis and then through to the present day, demand for sales and customer service skills have rebounded, whilst demand for communication has also grown significantly.
So which skills does it pay most to have? The table below shows the median salary of listings for the top ten demanded skills since April 2016.
|
Skill |
Median salary |
|
Communication |
£27,500 |
|
Management |
£33,000 |
|
Clients |
£30,000 |
|
Customer Service |
£22,500 |
|
Assertiveness |
£26,500 |
|
Sales |
£26,500 |
|
Solutions |
£36,000 |
|
Engineering |
£35,000 |
|
Data |
£32,500 |
|
Reporting |
£35,000 |
Despite being so highly demanded, the median salary for vacancies demanding communication skills is £1,500 below the national average for all vacancies (£29,000). This is because a lot of the occupations that demand communication skills quite highly are themselves low paying, including Recruitment Consultant (£23,000), Social Care Worker and Customer Service Adviser (both £18,200). The employers most demanding of communication skills over this period are Tesco and Barchester Healthcare – two companies with a lot of low wage occupation employees.
The same story is true of vacancies requesting customer service skills – Customer Service Adviser and Customer Service Assistant (median salary of £17,100) are low-paying roles that top employers requesting customer service skills including Specsavers, Aldi, Lidl and Halfords were recruiting for – and sales skills – Sales Assistant (£18,000) and Sales Adviser (£20,000) are low paying roles that top employers requesting sales skills including Asda, Dixons Carphone and Sky were recruiting for.
Conversely, listings requesting management skills (the second most demanded) have a median salary £4,000 above the national average – management roles such as Project Manager (£49,200) and Finance Manager (£45,000) are high paying. Management is a skill highly demanded by PwC as are solutions, reporting and data, other high paying skills.
High-paying occupations requesting these skills include IT System Architect (£75,000), Data Engineer (£60,000) and Financial Controller (£52,500). Additionally, average salaries are even higher when some of these skills are requested together. For instance, listings that request both data and solutions skills (which occurs for 27.9% of vacancies requesting data and 24.1% of vacancies requesting solutions) have a median salary of £42,500.
This clearly highlights the relationship between the level of skills an occupation requires and the salary employers are willing to offer to suitable candidates, as well as the complementarity of different but related skills.
This blog has pulled out datapoints relating to trends in skills demand since 2016 – as technological advancements and automation, the transition to Net Zero and the UK’s population continues to age, we can expect to see further changes.
In future blogs in this series, we will look at how labour market demand has varied across different parts of the UK over time.