Top Recruitment Sectors for growth in 2018

It is five years since I wrote my amazingly popular blog Top 5 Recruitment Sectors to be in for the next 5-10 years. At the time unemployment was still rising across most of Europe and the UK economy flat-lining.

25,000 views later things have transformed somewhat and we have seen some dramatic changes in the World.

Economic positive growth has returned to much of the world economy and the OECD outlook for 2018 is very positive. The UK voting for Brexit and the US voting for Donald Trump have seen a huge shift towards populist voting and a rejection of the establishment and globalisation and sadly the growth of extremist terrorism.
Overall however I believe our predictions have been pretty accurate.

At the time our predictions were:

• Information Technology
• Engineering
• Energy, Oil and Gas
• Healthcare
• Emerging Technology application

Anyone who moved into these sectors in 2013 would have seen a pretty successful period of opportunity and growth perhaps only energy, oil and gas sector agencies may have been disappointed.

This year I have accepted a few speaking engagements at conferences, the first of which is Recruitment Expo 2018 in London at the end of January.

There I will be talking about the Future of Recruitment 2020-2030 and will be sharing my views on what the world of employment and recruitment will look like in 2020-2030? What changes are likely and unlikely? Will Artificial Intelligence and Bots replace everyone and everything? Will recruiters still have a job and if so what will that job look like?

No. 4 Healthcare

This is predominantly in the area of temporary nursing and medical staff, which according to Kevin Green REC is a result of the strain on NHS Trusts.

“Nursing and medical staff remain the most in demand for temporary roles – further evidence of the strain the NHS is feeling on filling vacancies.

Whilst the above quote relates to his comments in the December 2017 IHS Markit/REC Report on Jobs what is clear is that this is a trend that is unlikely to subside in 2018 and if anything likely to accelerate as the demand for healthcare services shows no sign of abating.

As can been seen there are clearly huge supply issues as stated recently in the Guardian 13^th December 2017

While the NHS in England has 40,000 more clinical staff than in 2012, it is short of 42,000 nurses, midwives and therapists, according to Health Education England, which has drafted the NHS’s first strategy in 25 years to tackle chronic understaffing.

HEE, the NHS’s staffing agency, also warns that the health service workforce, which already stands at 1.4 million, will need to increase by 190,000 by 2027 unless the rise in illness recedes.

Bank and agency personnel cover most of the vacant shifts. But HEE warns that patients could receive poorer care because unavailability of staff is so common that 8% of vacant shifts go unfilled, thus “increasing pressure on existing staff and potentially impacting on quality”.

The HEE Report also highlighted:

Shortages are now so acute that:

• The NHS is short of 42,000 nurses, midwives, physiotherapists and occupational therapists.
• A widespread lack of nurses is most severe in London, where 15% of posts are vacant, and lowest at 8% in the north-east.
• There are 1,674 (26%) fewer district nurses and 842 fewer learning disability nurses than in 2012.
• GP numbers have fallen by 1% over the last five years despite a key government pledge to increase the total by 5,000 between 2015 and 2020.
• Almost one in three paramedic jobs are vacant across England.
• The number of nurses leaving the profession rose from 7.1% in 2011-12 to 8.7% last year.

The NHS has become much better at controlling off framework spend and so the barriers of entry for non-framework providers are high and we see them remaining so if not increasing in the future. This sector therefore has good growth opportunity for framework providers.

No. 3 Manufacturing

In the final quarter of 2017 manufacturing enjoyed its best quarter for three and a half years and the outlook given the reduction in the pound is for this to continue for the next 2-3 years.

No. 2 Engineering

As stated in previous years the top two sectors offer by far the greatest opportunity for growth than any others. This year however we do see manufacturing and healthcare starting to close the gap and for once it is possible that one of them could by the end of 2018 break into the top two.

We have stated this before but the scale of the problem is estimated to be:

Research suggests that 182,000 additional workers are needed to plug engineering-focused graduate and apprentice positions every year until 2022, according to Engineering UK.

 That’s over 1m more engineers.

According to Engineering UK; Currently the UK produces only 46,000 engineering graduates each year. There will also be demand for around 69,000 people qualified at advanced apprenticeship or equivalent level each year. Yet only around 27,000 UK apprentices a year currently qualify at the appropriate level.

There is light at the end of the tunnel but it is many years off and that is the introduction of the apprenticeship levy is forcing employers to look at investing in training, The numbers of higher apprenticeship scheme (degree equivalent) and the number of students embarking on these is growing and will accelerate over the next 2-3 years.

Sadly for employers these apprentices are 5-8 years away from making a significant impact on the skill shortage but it’s a start.

As with manufacturing, we see automation, AI, augmentation and bots having an impact, which will also help the UK productivity figures that are woefully behind the rest of the G7 countries.

Candidate shortages pervade the sector and the list of critical skills that people cannot source grows monthly.