BrighterMonday Kenya this week unveiled research that documents online job market activity based on data gathered from the platform’s database, and showcases supply and demand trends in the form of job listings and job applications.

The BrighterMonday Kenya Jobs Bulletin contains job market insights from the first half of 2021 in the form of industry trends and reviews job function trends between January and July 2021 as well as annual trends between July 2020 and July 2021.

According to the report, the NGO, NPO & Charity was the most sought-after industry in terms of supply between January- July 2021, which could be attributed to the renowned prevalence of international and local NGO & Civil Society organisations in Kenya, while the IT & Technology industry was the most wanted industry in terms of demand.

Meanwhile, Research, Teaching & Training was seen as the top job function in high supply while Sales was the top job function in high demand between January – July 2021.

The BrighterMonday bulletin, which analysed 9,474 job listings and 625,014 job applications and 18,675 job listings between January 2021 – July 2021 and 1,353,041 job applications from July 2020 – July 2021 to form this analysis, also shows that the supply for vacancies in the Government sector remained high as the overall top industry that employers posting vacancies operate in, followed by NGO, NPO & Charity and Education over the previous year.

According to BrighterMonday CEO Emmanuel Mutuma, data remains a critical tool to help employers plan their hiring and expose jobseekers to relevant trends to help them apply for jobs strategically. “This Bulletin is the first volume of a series of research that reviews hiring and application patterns to help our audiences leverage useful research to make more informed choices.” Emmanuel said.

Notably, the Hospitality & Hotel industry was among the top 5 industries high in demand, but does not appear among the highest in supply, which means the jobseekers in this industry are still in need of work after the disruption caused by the global pandemic.

“Digitisation of work due to COVID-19 has removed the geographic limitation for these roles. By extension, the same reason could create high demand because globalisation and remote work create capacity.”- the report states.

Overall, the month of January 2021 saw an increase in job applications across most of the top 6 industries, meaning more job seekers were looking for jobs at the beginning of the year. Furthermore, the high demand could be as a function of low bar to entry, coupled with cross/up-skilling that happened during the pandemic, as well as numerous qualified individuals churning out of institutions of higher learning

Looking at the overall supply versus demand for top industries, the Report shows that September and October 2021 recorded the highest number of job listings respectively while the majority of jobseekers applied for jobs between mid-year to November. Meaning, either employers should rethink when to advertise for jobs or job seekers should look at applying for jobs at critical times employers are seeking to hire.