With the latest numbers just being released, it is apparent that London’s finance industry has fewer vacancies than it had just a year ago in the same period of 2010. In August alone, jobs in the finance sector were actually down by 20% from the previous August and there is still double the amount of vacancies being produced than at the height of the most recent financial crisis in early 2009.
Layoffs continued throughout this past summer in response to banks’ efforts to cut costs. In one month alone, from July to August, openings dropped by 17% in the financial industry. There is a marked difference from just the beginning of this year when jobs were being consistently created and were up by 20%. Now that gain has been counteracted as the loss is equivalent at 20% in the month of August.
If these figures would be compared year on year, the financial industry now has 9% fewer vacancies overall than in the year 2010 for the same period. However, the UK is not alone in their plight as banks throughout Europe and in the United States are also announcing cuts.
In the United States alone it was announced that banks have cut staff by as many as 70,000 workers only since January of this year. All these cuts were the result of a slump in trading amidst fears of a double dip recession and a fall in the global economy, not just in Europe and the U.S.
Throughout all this, banks are still expecting some amount of improvement during the final quarter of this year as they work towards wrapping up one year whilst preparing for the next. This usually brings back some amount of normality but even so, there are still huge concerns as to whether or not this will actually create any new vacancies.
