The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes quarterly bulletins and spreadsheets on employment trends. These are mainly based on the Labour Force Survey. The figures presented here are based on the latest release at time of writing, from December 2011. You can download the full spreadsheet in a ZIP format, here.

Not all of the data provided will be of help in making careers choices, but one of the more useful spreadsheets (tabs 5 and 6 if you have downloaded the spreadsheet) shows employment trends in different industries.

Spreadsheets can be difficult to read. In this section, we will use a simple tool (Google Charts) to visualise the data.

First, we will look at employment trends across various industries. These are based on a classification system known as the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC2007).
The following chart shows the employment levels in thousands by industry in September 2011.

It is also possible to look at changes in employment over time and to find which industries are growing and which contracting. The following table (based again on the spreadsheet you can download above) looks at employment in the Information and Communication industry over the last three years. Of course if you downloaded more spreadsheets from the ONS, you could extend the time-frame. Equally, you can take another occupation and use Google spreadsheets and Charts to make your own visualisation.

One thing to be careful of when looking at charts is the scale on the different axes. If we were to extend the bottom horizontal scale it would make the changes in numbers employed appear much less and equally if we narrowed the scale it would look much bigger!

Employment in different regions and local areas
Employment varies greatly in different industries in different regions and between urban and rural areas. The following chart shows the percentage of jobs in the Information and Communication industry in September 2011 by region.

The official government statistics site, NOMIS, has a great series of tools that make it very easy to select and download regional and local data. In this short screencast, we show how we selected the data.
This second screencast shows how we visualised the data using Google charts.
Screencast 2

The same tools on the NOMIS site make it very quick and simple to download detailed Labour Market Information for any UK local authority area. Just click on Local Authority (district/county areas) in the summary statistics box (see screencast below) and type in a postcode or select the local authority in the drop down menu and you will see the report on line or can download it as a PDF file.

Here is an example we have downloaded for the Basingstoke and Deane local authority area (note that the data may not always look up-to-date, but may be the most up-to-date available). Data are even available at a ward level although, in general, the more local the data, the less reliable it is.