Adzuna’s Unemployment Predictor, which calculates the UK’s unemployment rate 5-6 months ahead of the ONS was released last Friday with a couple of notable statistics.

In the initial four months of 2015, the UK unemployment rate saw its first period of stagnation, following what has been a sustained and unprecedented few years of growth.

But it might be temporary…

Adzuna operates an Unemployment Predictor which is suggesting this sudden downturn in employment growth might be a temporary blip.   Taking into consideration an enormous range of contributing factors, the Unemployment Predictor, comes-up with 3-month forecasts of the seasonally-adjusted UK unemployment rate for people aged 16 & over; the rate which the Office for National Statistics (ONS) uses in its official headline figures.

According to the predictor (which remember is working retrospectively) the proportion of unemployed people in April stood at 5.58%, representing only a minute decrease of (-0.01%) on the previous month.

However, looking forward, the Unemployment Predictor seems to indicate that the rate of unemployment will decrease more substantially in the coming months, to just 5.04% of the total UK workforce by July.  That might not seem like a particularly staggering figure, but consider that this rate of decline would represent a doubling of that experienced in the first quarter of 2015 and it’s suddenly rather impressive!

12,000 NHS Vacancies

More tellingly, and just in time for the UK General Election is the fact that the institution with the most job listings on Adzuna.com in April was the NHS, with just over 12,000 job listings available. Yep, that’s right, 12,000 jobs available!  At a time when mainstream political parties talk-up recruiting more doctors and nurses into the NHS, one must ask the question, why aren’t these jobs being filled?

As Andrew Hunter CEO of Adzuna suggests “The NHS is far more of a national institution than many people realise. It’s a dominant UK employer. But such a significant hiring spree could signal a gap in the skills of UK employees, with a shortage of qualified doctors and nurses. It’s never just about the employers: if people in the UK don’t have the right skills, they simply can’t take up these positions. To really reduce unemployment, the new government will need to focus on upskilling our workforce.”

Which, around election time, when all the mainstream political parties talk the talk about reducing immigration into the UK – the elephant remains, if the migrant skilled worker; nurse and Doctor, don’t take up some of these 12,000 positions – who will?

TheEmployable wait with baited breath to see some political leadership on this issue… we could be here for quite some time.