Austria's job market collapses: Open places at record low!

Austria's job market collapses: Open places at record low!

The year 2024 brings dark news for the Austrian labor market! According to 5min.at , the number of open spots sank on average on average on 173,800, which corresponds to a dramatic decline of 15.8 percent compared to 2023. General Director Tobias Thomas from Statistics Austria emphasizes that this is the second year in a row in which the job offers decrease. Trading and service sectors are particularly affected, where 57.5 percent of all open places were shown. The shortage of skilled workers remains a serious problem for the Austrian economy, and the open job quota is 4.0 percent per year.

But not only Austria is faced with this development. The situation in Germany is no better! As the IAB reports, the vacancies in the third quarter of 2024 fell by 26 percent compared to the previous year's quarter. This means that 1.28 million vacancies are still available nationwide, which corresponds to a dramatic decline of over a third since the highest level of almost 2 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. The IAB underlines that the downward movement of the job offer in West Germany is more pronounced than in East Germany, and the number of open spots has mainly fallen in small and medium-sized companies.

economic challenges and trends

The reasons for this dramatic decline are diverse: the continued economic stagnation, the consequences of the Ukraine conflict and increasing prices have a negative impact on the number of employment in both countries. In Germany, the ratio of unemployed to open spots has increased to 2.2, which illustrates the challenges for employers to find suitable specialists. This development is in the context of upheavals in industry, digitization and demographic changes, as the IAB states in its report.