Welcome to our interactive Labour Shortages calculator tool.
This is a short series of articles and interactive graphics meant to explain and help you explore the UK’s current labour shortage problems post-pandemic.
If you want to dive right in, start here and then click through to the next page whenever you finish a page.
The tool starts with two pages explaining the basic problems facing the UK right now, and then moves on to interactive plots where you can explore the various issues in more detail yourself.
If you want to jump back in to any particular point, here is a list of all of the pages in the series:
- Employment by Industry Post-Covid
- Market Tightness by Industry Post-Covid
- Who Is Driving the Decline in Search Effort?
- Why is it Hard to Hire: How Much or Where Workers Are Looking?
- Are Labour Shortages Feeding Through to Wage Increases?
And here is a summary of our main findings:
- Prime-age employment in the UK is roughly 250,000 workers lower than it was before the pandemic. This is despite unemployment being near all time lows. The missing jobs are instead due to workers leaving the labour force — either by choosing to become economically inactive, ageing out of the labour force, or leaving the country — which is the root of the Labour Shortage problem.
- Our analysis shows that the problems are even worse. Some sectors like Manufacturing have lost many more workers than others, but the workers who lost jobs in these industries have moved on and taken jobs in other industries.
- Labour shortages are not just due to the record number of vacancies. Workers are also searching for jobs less than before the pandemic, especially Employed and Inactive workers.
- Many industries with the largest employment declines during the pandemic now have the worst labour shortages.
- This is because workers are now less willing to search for jobs in these badly hit sectors and have reallocated their search effort elsewhere.
- Therefore fixing the UK’s labour shortages will require not just convincing workers to return to work, but also to search for jobs in industries, such as Manufacturing, where they no longer want to work.
- Some shortage industries seem to be responding by offering high real wage growth to workers, while others are not, which might be exacerbating their shortages.