Understanding local job markets is important for the UK economy. If we know which jobs are being advertised most frequently, and what relevant skills local people have, it helps us to identify potential worker shortages or surpluses, and where additional training might be needed.
Select your local authority area below, to learn which occupations were advertised the most in your local area up to August 2024, and how well-matched the skills of the local population were to jobs across 2023.
Jump to commentary on online job adverts in the UK
In this analysis, all London local authorities are combined, because adverts in London typically do not state in which part of London the job is located. Data for the Isles of Scilly are unavailable because of small sample sizes.
Care workers were the most commonly advertised occupation in the UK in April to June 2024
After peaking in December 2021, UK job advert volumes have been gradually declining, and are now similar to pre-pandemic levels at 3.4 adverts per 100 working-age people in August 2024.
Across the UK, the most commonly advertised jobs in Quarter 2 (April to June) 2024 were:
- Care workers and home carers, making up 2.3% of all adverts (around 33,700 adverts)
- Sales accounts and business development managers (2.0%, or around 29,600 adverts)
- Book-keepers, payroll managers and wages clerks (1.7%, or around 25,200 adverts)
You can explore where these jobs were advertised most often in the map below.
Select one of the 10 most commonly advertised occupations in the UK in Quarter 2 2024, and see the proportion of adverts in each local authority that were for that occupation.
Where are the UK's most advertised occupations the most common?
Proportion of all adverts in local authority that were for the selected occupation, UK, April to June 2024
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Download the data for proportion of most-advertised occupations by local authority [XLSX, 126KB]
While adverts for care workers made up 2.3% of all online adverts in the UK in Quarter 2 2024, in Broadland in Norfolk, they made up almost 1 in 10 live online adverts (9.8%). This was the highest of any UK local authority.
Areas where care worker jobs made up the highest proportion of online adverts tended to be areas with older populations: in Broadland, Causeway Coast and Glens in Northern Ireland, and in Wyre in North West England, there are more people aged 65 and over than the UK average.
We can also explore how the number of adverts for a given occupation has changed over the last year.
While care workers and home carers, along with programmers and software developers, were among the most commonly advertised occupations in the UK, they also saw some of the biggest declines in adverts over the last year.
The number of care worker and home carer adverts fell 23% between Quarter 2 2023 and Quarter 2 2024, or by more than 10,000 adverts.
Adverts for programmers and software developers declined the most of any occupation in the year to Quarter 2 2024, falling by 49%, or over 23,000 adverts.
Meanwhile, adverts for heavy and large goods vehicle (HGV) drivers almost doubled in the year to Quarter 2 2024, rising 99% (equal to nearly 6000 more live adverts).
Adverts for HGV drivers almost doubled in the year to Quarter 2 2024
Annual change between April to June 2023 to April to June 2024, Occupations with the largest increase in share of online advert volumes, UK
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You can find the shares of adverts for all occupations for all local authorities in the associated data tables.
Data sources and quality
The analysis in this article uses data on online job adverts from Textkernel from June 2017 to August 2024, and skills supply data from 2023.
Skills supply data include information on professional skills of populations based on an individual’s current and / or recent jobs from the Annual Population Survey. The skills associated with each job are defined by The Occupational Information Network, or O*NET.
Occupations are defined based on the Standard Occupation Classification for the UK (SOC 2020).
More information on data sources and the methods used in the analysis of job adverts are available in Measuring labour demand volumes across the UK using Textkernel data: user guide. Further information on the skills supply data and methods are available in Measuring skill and qualification suitability in the UK labour market: user guide.
All data on job advert volumes by local authority and by occupation (SOC), as well as skills supply data for each UK local authority, are included in the associated data tables.