Friday, September 28, 2007

Where are there more jobs going than people to fill them? In Canberra, that's where.

The ACT has the tightest employment market in Australia. The latest figures released by the Bureau of Statistics yesterday show that there are now only five people unemployed in the ACT for every six jobs that are vacant.

The ACT was the only state or territory in which the number of vacancies exceeded the number of people unemployed.

The next tightest jobs market in August was Western Australia’s where the number of people unemployed exceeded the number of vacant jobs 35,300 to 29,700.

In Queensland there were roughly twice as many people unemployed as vacant jobs, in NSW and South Australia roughly three times as many, and in Victoria roughly four times as many...

Tasmania had the worst unemployed to job vacancy ratio in the country with 2,800 unemployed people chasing 12,900 jobs.

The Bureau’s measure of job vacancies is more accurate than the measures of job advertisements put out by organisations such as the ANZ Bank because it counts the number of actual vacancies reported in a survey rather than the number advertised.

The ANZ Bank found that 973 ACT jobs were advertised in August, a fraction of the 6,100 that the Bureau found were actually vacant.

3,700 of the vacant jobs were in Canberra’s private sector; 2,400 in the public sector.

Nationwide the number of job vacancies hit a record high in August, and also a record high in relation to the number of people unemployed.

Australia’s unemployment rate was 4.1 per cent in August. The ACT’s was 2.5 per cent.