Seek job ads show housing picking up mining slack

BOOMING housing investment is picking up the employment slack left by the resources sector, online job advertising figures from Seek show.

Jobs advertising.

BOOMING residential housing investment is picking up the employment slack left by Australia’s weakening resources sector, online job advertising figures from Seek show.

Mining, resources and energy job advertising online tumbled 36 per cent in the year to December, while ads in the design and architecture space shot up 42 per cent.

The figures come on the back of a more-than 50 per cent fall in the price of iron ore from this time a year ago and a more than 60 per cent plunge in the price of oil over the same period, which has seen resources investment nosedive and left questions around which sectors will step up as employment drivers.

“Design is on the increase as stable interest rates encourage home owners to undertake their renovations and/or upsizing,” Seek’s managing director of employment and learning, Joe Powell, said.

“Residential property investment has been strong, which is likely influencing the significant increase we’ve seen in architecture, drafting and interior design.”

Seek reported overall online job ads growth of 9.7 per cent in the calendar year, broadly in line with Monday’s ANZ job ads survey, which showed a 11.4 per cent rise. The ANZ data accounts for both online and newspaper advertising and December’s figure represented seven straight months of positive results.

Behind design and architecture, education saw a healthy 16 per cent lift, according to Seek, as did agribusiness, while manufacturing and logistics gained 13 per cent as the Australian dollar and oil prices both sharply declined.

While strength in online job ads in these non-mining industries is encouraging, other larger sectors like retail, Australia’s biggest according to Australian Bureau of Statistics employment data, showed a weak 2 per cent growth.

And despite the explosion in architecture and design job advertising, the construction sector only saw 8 per cent growth. The latest private-sector data on job ads came after Australia’s unemployment rate retreated from a 12-year high in December, according to official data from the ABS this week.