BrighterMonday Kenya has unveiled a study that documents online job market activity based on data gathered from the platform’s database. The research further showcases supply and demand trends in the form of job listings and job applications.
The report, titled BrighterMonday Kenya Jobs Bulletin, contains job market insights from the first half of 2021 in the form of industry trends and reviews job function trends between January and July 2021. The report also covers annual trends between July 2020 and July 2021.
According to the report, the NGO, NPO and Charity was the most sought-after industry in terms of supply between January to July 2021. This could be attributed to the renowned prevalence of international and local NGO and Civil Society organizations in Kenya, while the IT and Technology industry was the most wanted industry in terms of demand. Research, teaching and training was seen as the top job function in high supply, while sales was the top job function in high demand between January to July 2021.
The BrighterMonday bulletin analyzed 9,474 job listings and 625,014 job applications and 18,675 job listings between January to July 2021 and 1,353,041 job applications from July 2020 to July 2021 to form this analysis. The bulletin further shows that the supply for vacancies in the Government sector remained high as the overall top industry that employers posting vacancies operate in, followed by NGO, NPO and Charity and Education over the previous year.
According to BrighterMonday CEO Emmanuel Mutuma, data remains a critical tool to help employers plan their hiring and expose jobseekers to relevant trends to help them apply for jobs strategically. “This Bulletin is the first volume of a series of research that reviews hiring and application patterns to help our audiences leverage useful research to make more informed choices,” he said.
Overall, January 2021 saw an increase in job applications across most of the top 6 industries, meaning more job seekers were looking for jobs at the beginning of the year. Furthermore, the high demand could be as a function of low bar to entry, coupled with cross/up-skilling that happened during the pandemic and numerous qualified individuals churning out of institutions of higher learning.