Jobs and Job Data in the COVID Era
The pandemic has led to a collapse in the global economy and most nations are on the verge of a recession. People are losing their jobs and the unemployment rate in May 2020 was 13.3%. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), approximately 25 million jobs have been threatened globally. The lockdown imposed by governments as an answer to the virus has affected around 81% of people. The world is on the verge of an economic crisis of the same extent as the Great Depression of the 1930s.
While the United States is allowing companies to fire their employees and then providing them unemployment benefits, other countries such as Germany, Italy, France, and the UK have decided to provide subsidies to the unemployed for their non-working hours. When work finally begins, these companies will not have to rehire employees again. While industries such as tourism and aviation have been badly affected, others such as healthcare, banking, agritech, pharmaceutical, FMCG, ed-tech are being depended on to revive the economy.
While most industries are coping with the pandemic in their ways, the tech sector, and companies that moved online, are thriving. Amazon had to hire around 100,000 more workers to meet with the rising orders as people in lockdown used the app to get essentials and groceries. Facebook saw a higher number of people making use of its messaging and video-calling features. Users of Microsoft’s software went up to 40% in just a week. In a post-pandemic world, people will most likely carry these habits over and the larger companies hold the potential to become bigger.
With professional life moving over to the digital sphere, it is clear that people with specialization in the concerned field will be given more preference. The world is going digital and that can be understood by the fact that online collaborative tools have seen a whooping jump of 775%. Keeping this in mind, Microsoft has launched an initiative in which it will help 25 million people acquire digital skills.
Having such industry insights is not possible to acquire manually and that is why most companies and research agencies are using Job-Scraping services to gather job listings and other job-related information and news articles, to have compiled data at hand. This data can then be used for various activities like hiring, predicting the growth of companies, exploring market opportunities, and more.
