Zug,20.09.2017

Advertised situations vacant up by 30%

The Page Group international human resources consulting company has been monitoring advertised situations vacant on company websites throughout Switzerland since 2012, with its Michael Page Swiss Job Index publishing some encouraging news of late, namely that the number of jobs advertised over July and August have increased by 2.3%. Indeed, looking at the figures since the beginning of the year, an increase of 10.9% has been recorded, with the greatest growth recorded in the German-speaking cantons.
 
Looking at the individual regions (of German-speaking Switzerland), however, while there was an increase of 8.7% in the number of jobs advertised in central Switzerland, a decline of 0.4% had been recorded in July and August.
 
Fortunately for the canton of Zug, the picture is rosier, with the figure relating to July and August up by 3.9%, and significantly higher than the national average. Indeed, when a journalist of the Zuger Zeitung pressed for more up-to-date information from the Michael Page company, the organisation said that the figure relating to the period between the middle of August and the middle of September (in relation to Zug) had risen to as high as 9.8%, the greatest increase in one month since the beginning of the year. Looking at the statistics from January until the middle of September, then this increase here in Zug amounted to 29.4%, three times the rate of the Swiss average.
 
When he was informed about this information, Bernhard Neidhart, the head of the Cantonal Department of Labour and the Economy, was pleasantly surprised, bearing in mind the unemployment rate in Zug had risen from 2.3% to 2.4% between the months of July and August (compared with the national average of 3% in June, down from 3.7% in January).
 
Neidhart went on to point out that, with so many international firms operating from the canton, it was inevitably strongly influenced by the world economy, hence any fluctuation would be noticed earlier here than in many other cantons. “And, fortunately, the world economy is currently on the up, with Germany doing particularly well,” he said.
 
Looking more closely at where these advertised situations vacant were, the greatest growth compared with last year was in relation to jobs in IT, up by 55.5% in fact, when compared with the previous year. This was followed by a 28.3% increase in jobs related to insurance and a 20% increase in those related to logistics. As Neidhart pointed out, these were areas very much associated with international companies, as he added he hoped demand in these areas would help alleviate unemployment here.
 
Nicolai Mikkelsen, the director of Michael Page, said it was particularly where firms were implementing digitisation and rationalisation projects to save costs and improve their services, in addition to those subject to continual new regulation, where there was strongest demand for jobs, and not least in the search for suitably qualified candidates with international experience in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, (of which, of course, there are many in Zug).