Member Article

Providing job vacancy data to New Economy Manchester

As one of its core objectives, New Economy Manchester, part of the Manchester Growth Company, delivers policy, strategy and research for Greater Manchester’s economic growth and prosperity, providing regular analysis to underpin strategic direction. In order to be able to carry out the analysis which underpins this, New Economy needs to have access to a variety of data sources relating to the labour market and wider economy. It was a challenge to try to obtain regular information on job vacancies – in terms of total numbers as well as the types of occupations that employers are recruiting for. While Nomis (a service provided by the Office for National Statistics) remains an important source of labour market information, it no longer includes up to date job vacancy data. Figures used to be freely available online but production of these ended in November 2012.

Active Informatics talked with Richard Cook, Principal Researcher at New Economy, about how they are using Labour/Insight.

“We began subscribing to Labour/Insight in 2013, when a new feature was introduced which allowed us to analyse data down to a local authority level. That is very important for us as Greater Manchester is comprised of ten districts and we need to be able to analyse figures for each of these areas,” Richard said. “There is nothing as comprehensive currently available in terms of providing up to date vacancies data. As well as being able to look at high level data on trends in vacancies by occupation type, for example, the tool is also good in allowing a user to click on the individual vacancies as well, so you can see what types of job specifications are actually out there.”

The Manchester Monitor

New Economy uses data from Labour/Insight for various projects, such as the Manchester Monitor. The Manchester Monitor is a dashboard of Greater Manchester specific data and indicators designed to provide a snapshot of the economic wellbeing of the area. The high level data from Labour/Insight is used in the People monitor section, with more detailed data on occupations and skills clusters available on the website.

Localised vacancy data research

New Economy has also undertaken specific research requests for some of the districts within Greater Manchester. This has included analysis of vacancies in the digital/creative sector for a number of the conurbations local authorities. The reports produced serve as a source of information to the districts, who would not have an access to it otherwise. Labour/Insight is also helpful in dealing with ad-hoc requests that are received by New Economy, which can often include requirements for more specific data on particular occupation types and skills requirements that employers need in a particular area.

Working with colleges and training providers in Greater Manchester

New Economy has recently worked on a project with colleges and training providers in Greater Manchester to source real job specifications for students to learn about the current labour market and the type of skills companies are looking for. Labour/Insight helped them to quickly find the right vacancy descriptions to give the students good insight into what employers are looking for.

“As we have become more familiar with the database, we have started to use the tool for more research requests,” Richard continued, “Labour/Insight is good in a sense that it is not a static database, with new features being added over the course of our subscription.”

About Labour/Insight

Labour/Insight is a real time LMI tool for the United Kingdom that extracts, derives and infers more than 70 data elements from any given free-text job listing thanks to its patented technology called ‘Statistical Natural Language Processing’ (SNLP).

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Zlata Larsen .