As do healthcare and engineering professions….

This week, as an early Christmas present, I got one of the best gifts I have received in a long time – the details of every job advert in the North of England from the last three years. The data, courtesy of Adzuna, is part of a wider project to quantify the digital skills gap in the North of England.

There are a total of 7 million rows of information, so I’ve been wrestling it into shape using AWS S3, R and Python over the past couple of days. I had to work quickly, as I was keen to share my first output this side of Christmas for all the avid readers!

Figure 1 is some of the first output. It depicts the spread of job adverts by sector and region.

Some initial conclusions:

• IT jobs dominate labour demand
• Healthcare roles are far more common in the North East
• In terms of absolute roles being advertised, IT jobs in the North West are by the far the most common