Labour market
With the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data related to employment, workforce dynamics, researchers can study employment rates, job vacancies, skill demands, wage trends, workforce demographics, educational qualifications, employment sectors, and labour force participation.
Job listings data
UBDC offers access to the Adzuna online job listings dataset spanning 2016-2024.
These longitudinal data encompass more than 350 million job advertisements collected through weekly snapshots of Adzuna.co.uk, the UK’s most popular vacancy search engine. These adverts represent aggregated and de-duplicated UK job listings from various online platforms.
Adzuna facilitates labour market analysis using Big Data, a rare opportunity within a UK context. Researchers can leverage its size to uncover novel and detailed insights into trends in labour demand, regional inequalities, real-time wage offerings, and evolving skill requirements, among other issues.
Derived variables include a longitudinal advert identifier, job title, salary information, skill requirements, occupation and sector classification codes, a range of location identifiers (e.g. local authority and travel to work areas), job seniority, advert posting and removal dates, and a company identifier. The latter facilitates integration with FAME, a dataset capturing a wealth of information on company performance. For a full list of Adzuna variables, see meta data.
In addition, the inclusion of full advert descriptions offers rich textual insight into emerging job trends, evolving recruitment strategies, changing work arrangements, and other dynamic aspects of the labour market that may not be fully reflected in official statistics.
Official UK labour market statistics can be accessed through the ONS. For example, official vacancy statistics be found here. Survey information on wages and hours is available through ASHE, while a comprehensive picture of all official labour market statistics can be accessed through NOMIS.
Data Catalogue
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Tools and Methods
In our work with smart data, we have developed and adapted a wide range of methods. We make these methods and related code or tools available as part of our data service. Links can be found from the relevant data collections.