New City jobs down by 20 per cent, but engineering experiences growth
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Your support makes all the difference.The number of new jobs that are being created in London's financial sector has tumbled by 20 per cent following disappointing quarterly banking results and uncertainty about the markets.
Just 4,030 City jobs were created last month, compared with 5,030 in August 2010, according to figures compiled by financial services recruitment agency Astbury Marsden.
Mark Cameron, chief operating officer at Astbury Marsden, said the slowdown has been dramatic this year. There have been disappointing second-quarter trading results across all the main investment banks as the effects of the US debt and eurozone crises and general market jitters take hold.
This has forced banks and other financial services businesses, including wealth-management firms, to scale back their hiring plans. Mr Cameron says this is the effect of changes to bonus payouts since the credit crunch.
"It had been far easier for banks and hedge funds to respond to a blip in revenue by simply reducing the amount in the bonus pool," he said. "The current City pay structures – which introduced higher base salaries to counteract lower bonus payments – have meant that City firms looking to lower costs have little option other than to reduce headcount."
One sector with a significant number of new job vacancies is engineering and manufacturing, with year-on-year growth of 21 per cent in July, according to the Association of Professional Staffing Companies. July was the fourth consecutive month the sector recorded the fastest growth in new job vacancies, but the APSC suggested heat was coming out of the market.
Property and construction was the second fastest-growing sector, up 14 per cent, followed by IT and telecoms at 6 per cent. John Nurthen, of Staffing Industry Analysts, which compiled data for the APSC, said:"Confidence levels are very volatile and advance or retreat every 24 hours. These July figures are less robust than those for June and the effects of the eurozone crisis and mixed messages from the US economy were probably starting to kick in."
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