Working Life > Job Market

The Job Market – Current and Future

Definition, Explanation

Like on a marketplace, labour is offered on the job market by potential workers, and demanded by companies, respective employers. The means of trading in labour are recruitment agencies / placement services, being institutions or online portals. Government influences the framework conditions of this market and can keep the demand level for labour high within certain ranges.

Distinctions within the German job market:

• Primary job market: Companies demand, and workers offer their manpower
• Secondary job market: Artificially made job market. Politics subsidize employment by manipulating working conditions, creating additional jobs, or offering them directly, as done in job-creation measures (ABM, Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen), or structural adjustment measures (SAM, Strukturanpassungsmaßnahme). Goals of such measures are unemployment decrease and enabling grown employment relations to move up into primary job market
• Third job market (merely discussed up to now): government-supported measures for difficult to place long-term unemployed
• Market of illicit employment

Job market analysis is done by:

• Age
• Sex
• Foreign, non-foreign
• Disabled, non-disabled
• Region (North, East, South, West, Abroad)
• Branches of economy (products, resp. services)
• Profession
• Entrepreneur, manager, employee
• Degree of mechanization of a job
• Working people (self-employed, and employed paying social insurance contributions), unemployed, hidden reserve
• Full-time, part-time work, short work, temporary employment
• Current and future job market

Tips, Checklist

• Especially as a starter in working life, you should get familiar with jon offers on the job market. They are a good overview of what kind of labour is being demanded and what competences are being looked for
• In order to hold one's own in the future job market, it is important to inform oneself of current developments and to adapt to them
• Regularly read the newspaper and/or inform yourself about the future of the job market. What branches, products, services are "dying out", what others are being "newly born"? What kind of jobs will no longer be a part of the future job market, what jobs are growing?
• Concern yourself with it in time, in how far your competences fit the job market requirements. Also take into account effects of globalization
• Only permanent learning and education guarantee remaining fit for a changing job market
• Regularly check on your employability

Last update: 04/13/2011