What’s going on?
The CIPD, also (The chartered institute of personnel and development) which are a human resource management company have found that for the first time since the start of the pandemic, there was a positive outlook on employability.
Over half of 2000 firms CIPD surveyed stated that they plan to hire more people in the first quarter of 2021. This is due to unemployment soaring high and a number of sectors being poorly affected.
Unemployment was reaching an all-time peak in decades, with hundreds of thousands of people being made redundant or struggling to find jobs. CIPD found that the number of redundancies has dropped from 30% at the start of the pandemic to Jan 2021.
Unemployment rates
The graph below shows the percentage of people over the age of 16 who are unemployed
The worst sectors that were hit with unemployment were hospitality and retail. Hundreds of thousands of people were made redundant due to lockdown putting a great deal of organisations out of business or forcing them to reduce staff, due to no income during the pandemic.
Whereas, healthcare, finance and IT sectors have thrived in constantly hiring and having roles available during the pandemic.
CIPD found that between March-December 2020, there were 10 million people on furlough. The government’s furlough scheme, which was meant to end on 30th April, helped in slowing down the number of redundancies in the UK, this has helped businesses and organisations to keep staff and still be able to pay them instead of them losing their jobs.
However, HR professionals argued that this scheme has mainly protected public sector workers and if furlough is not extended until June 2021, there could be problems for private sector workers which could cause the British economy further “shocks” from redundancies in the private sector.
“It would be hugely counterproductive if the government’s financial support faltered, while some of the biggest sectors of the UK economy are still in survival mode,”
– Gerwyn Davies from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)
For more information visit: BBC.News
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