Keeping an eye on regulatory changes impacting your sector is a key way to stay one step ahead of the market. Recently announced, the Data Protection Act 2023 has caused a rise in hiring data privacy lawyers, making it the top skill in demand for in-house legal counsel nationwide. Data Privacy now accounts for 8.4% of all in-house legal vacancies, surpassing other specialist functions.
When Bill Gates was asked in 2016, which three areas the students of today should focus on to be future-proofed, he said economics, mathematics and computer science. Just over five years later, generative AI is changing the paradigm again, where for people in IT Development, they are not just the disruptors, but also becoming the disrupted.
As we have touched on before many times, 2023 has been quiet compared to the mania of the last few years and job volumes have been significantly lower. This has led to talent teams within businesses being scaled back and given this is the most critical function for businesses looking to hire, it acts as a good indicator as to business confidence. When businesses increase hiring into internal recruiters, there is confidence in growth, when vacancies drop, this means there will be less hiring.
As we enter the final quarter of the year, for many people, 2023 has been challenging in a way not seen for several years. Job flow has slowed down, and as a result, for recruiters, revenues have dropped too. In previous posts we have touched on, how vacancies have dropped year on year, equally what is interesting when looking at 2023, is the variance by sector. For some markets, there should now be signs of optimism, where for others, Q3 saw the lowest job totals posted in the year to date.
As the UK economy teeters between anaemic growth, a cost of living crisis, strikes over pay crippling the public sector along with interest rates at generational highs leading to recruitment slowing down significantly when compared to 2022, it can be easy to be negative. Nonetheless, as business leaders, the challenge is to find a way to succeed regardless. In recruitment, that starts with identifying markets which are outperforming others, and segments that still seeing buoyant demand. With that in mind, this week, we have highlighted Luxury Goods as a sector to watch. Why?
In June 2014, the British Government of the time, announced their headline scheme to power growth in the north. “The Northern Powerhouse” was meant to bring together cities across the North, so that they collectively could ‘take on the world’ in the words of George Osborne, who announced the initiative. Upon it being announced, a swathe of initiatives were introduced, to stimulate investment, including the Greater Manchester devolution deal along with the Northern Transport strategy. With that, what we have seen, is a geographic area that had when it was launched, accounted for 16.7% of the population of the country and 13% of the vacancies, see their share of the vacancy market rise to 20% now. Put simply, in terms of job creation, the North is outperforming the rest of the country.
