Thursday, March 31, 2011

What's your chance of getting that job?

SMH
It depends where you are

Looking for a job? Don’t try here in NSW. On average there are four unemployed locals competing for each vacant position. In Tasmania it’s even worse - there are seven.

The best place to find a job, statistically, is in the Northern Territory. It boasts about one vacant job for each unemployed local. Australia’s most authoritative vacancy survey compiled by the Bureau of Statistics finds 3800 jobs going begging the Territory while its employment survey finds 3900 locals looking.

The Australian Capital Territory is also good, on paper. The number of unemployed locals only just outweighs the number of vacant positions. But it isn’t as good as it looks because many of the people who work and look for work in Canberra live just outside it in towns such as Queanbeyan, Bungendore and Goulburn and many of the public service jobs in it are designed to be filled by recruits from interstate.

If you are looking for big numbers of jobs and very little competition, Western Australia is the place to go. With less than a third the population of NSW, it finds itself with two thirds as many vacant jobs...

In February there were 31,000 Western Australian jobs going begging, and 60,000 Western Australians looking, a ratio of 1.9 vacant jobs for each unemployed local.

The persistence of the imbalance suggests the east of Australia doesn’t want to move there. WA sources most of its population growth from overseas.

And an increasing number of its jobs are ones many Australians can’t handle.

The mining industry had an all-time record 8,100 vacancies in February, dwarfing every other industry as a proportion of the 205,100 it employs. Australia's biggest-employing industry, health care and social assistance, was looking for 16,400 workers. But it employs 1.3 million.

Published in today's SMH


Related Posts

. Looking for a job - don't look in Victoria, even though it's piling them on

. Unemployment with a 4 in front of it. Good for men.


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