The local labour market :: Business and Management Studies

The local labour market Whilst looking into the local labour market, I have decided to study some of the figures from the national statistics and look into how WPA would use them if they needed to recruit new employees both locally and nationally. Resident population and age The resident population of west Somerset, as measured in the 2001 census, was 35,075, of which 47 percent were male and 53 percent were female. The majority of the population in west Somerset are aged 30 to 59 with 38.3 percent of the population being in this age group. This is slightly less than the percentage of 41.5 percent in the age group of 30 to 59 in England and Wales. .6 percent of people in west Somerset and aged 16 to 19 compared to 4.9 percent of people in England and Wales. There is a very minimal difference, therefore if WPA wanted 16 to 19 year olds as they have just finished school and may be going into full time or part time work, west Somerset has almost the same percentage of this age group. If WPA wanted school leavers they could look locally and have the same number of people on average from that age group. Health and provision of care In west Somerset, 64.7 percent of people asked said they would describe their health as good, this is only slightly less than the percentage of people in England and Wales with 68.6 percent. In west Somerset however 25.5 percent of people would describe their health as fairly good this is higher than the national average of 22.2 percent. West Somerset had a higher percentage of people who had a long-term illness with 22.3 percent, the national average is 18.2 percent. If WPA were to use this information they could see that 90.2 percent of people in West Somerset said they had good or fairly good health, but 90.8 percent of people as a national average said they had good or fairly good health, this tells WPA that people living in Somerset have good health so they would have a very large selection of people living in Somerset who have a good or fairly good health to choose from, they could therefore attempt to recruit locally then if they are unsuccessful they can then recruit nationally where there is only 0.6 percent more people who said they had good or fairly good health. Economic activity – unemployment Unemployment rates are lower with 2.9percent in West Somerset compared to a national average of 3.4 percent. This means that there may not be a large selection of qualified people in the West Somerset area so WPA