Chart Focus: Job Vacancies in Australia

Let’s have a look at the major indices monitoring the health of the job market.

The ANZ Job Index
According to the ANZ Job series, total job advertisement grew by 1.3% in July, to be 36.1% higher than they were last July. The economy added 171,685 jobs on average per week. Surprisingly, print ads did very well increasing by 1.2% while internet job ads grew only 1.3%.

The Advantage Job Index
The advantage job index painted a slightly different picture – job ads dropped by 1.3%. It should be noted here that ANZ internet series includes data from Seek; Hudson Global Resources; and jobsearch.gov.au. While the Advantage Job Index monitors data from Seek, Mycareer and CareerOne.  

The Internet Vacancy Index:  
The DEEWR Internet Vacancy Index (IVI) is a count of online vacancies on SEEK, My Career, Career One and Australian JobSearch. The index, a three month moving average, increased by 0.9% in June 2010 to 80.3 (the next release date is 18 August).

Two other indices – SEEK employment Index and ABS Job vacancies (Cat 6354.0) – will shed further light on job vacancies when they are released later this month. However, with unemployment rate currently sitting at 5.1% it’s clear that the health of the job market is in a much better shape than it was a year ago.