Which were the most demanded occupations in 2024?

In 2024, the highest job vacancy rate in the EU was registered for sales, marketing and development managers, with 8.4%. This means that this occupation had the highest unmet labour demand, indicating possible difficulties in recruiting staff. These figures are partly compiled using a novel data source on online job advertisements (OJA) and are therefore published as experimental statistics. 

The next occupations with the highest vacancy rates were manufacturing labourers and other clerical support workers (7.3% each), other sales workers (6.1%) and artistic, cultural and culinary associate professionals (6.0%).

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Source dataset: jvs_a_isco3_r1

Although occupations in the public sector, such as healthcare workers and teachers, may also face recruitment difficulties, they are less likely to be advertised online, meaning they rank lower or are not featured in these data. On the other hand, IT professions might be over-represented in online job advertisements data.

For more information

• Statistics Explained article on job vacancy statistics
• Thematic section on experimental statistics - job vacancy rate by occupation and region
• Thematic section on the labour market
• Database on the labour market
• Top & trending skills

Methodological notes

• The job vacancy rate measures unmet labour demand by relating the number of unfilled posts to the total amount of vacant and occupied posts.
• The figures in this news article are compiled using online job advertisements (OJA) data from Eurostat’s web intelligence hub and EU-labour force survey data on the number of employees to break down the total number of job vacancies and occupied posts obtained from official job vacancy statistics by occupation. 
• Online job advertisements differ from job vacancies: some vacancies are not advertised on the web (e.g. in the public sector), whereas others are overrepresented. A job advertisement could also refer to several vacancies or might not correspond to a vacant post at all (in case the employer just wishes to explore possible recruitment opportunities). Conversely, a job advertisement for the same vacancy could be posted on several web portals, hence creating a risk of multiple counting in OJA. More details on the accuracy of this data source can be found in the metadata at WIH-OJA. 
• Data are also available by country/NUTS 1 region, combined with occupations classified according to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO 3 digit level), for the following EU countries: Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden. In the case of Belgium, Spain and France, data are available by ISCO 3-digit occupation only (see dataset jvs_a_isco3_r1, which will replace dataset jvs_oja_eu).
• More information can be found in the methodological note. 

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