This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
The highest job churn rate was recorded in the Administrative & Support Service Activities sector (24.9%), followed by the Accommodation & Food Service Activities sector (19.6%).
The lowest churn rate in Q1 2024 was observed in the Industry sector at 7.3%, followed by the Information & Communication sector and Financial, Insurance & Real Estate Activities (7.4% and 7.6% respectively).
The Accommodation & Food Service Activities sector had the highest number of hirings (33,545), separations (45,861) and job destructions (21,734) of all the economics sectors in Q1 2024. This sector also recorded the highest job churn in the quarter at 48,254.
The economic sector with the highest proportion of stayers in Q1 2024 was the Industry sector 93.6%, while the lowest proportion of stayers was in the Administrative & Support Service Activities (82.9%).
The sector that saw the highest number of job creations in Q1 2024 was Human Health & Social Work Activities (11,292), though this is a decrease of 19.0% (-2,642) from a year earlier.
The largest year-on-year increase in job creations in Q1 2024 were seen in Public Administration & Defence, where creations were up 115.0% to 7,817 and Education, where creations rose 95.0% to 7,676.
The largest year-on-year percentage decrease in job creations in Q1 2024 was in the Information & Communications sector, down 25.6% to 4,141.
The economic sector that saw the highest number of people who left their primary employment but remained in the same sector in Q1 2024 was Human Health & Social Work Activities, where 1 in 3 separations were working in the same sector in the next quarter.
In the Public Administration & Defence sector, two out of every three primary employment separations were employed in a different economic sector in the next quarter – the highest proportion of all economic sectors in Q1 2024.
The firm size with the highest churn rate in Q1 2024 was the 50-249 employee group, where the churn was 14.4%, down from 15.9% in Q1 2023.
The firm size with the lowest churn rate in Q1 2024 was the 1-9 employee group, where the churn rate was 6.1%, down from 6.4% in Q1 2023.
In Q1 2024 all firm size groups observed a decrease in churn rate when compared with Q1 2023. The largest decrease was seen in firms of 500-999 employees, down 2.7 percentage points from a churn rate of 15.7% to 13.0%.
Firms with 49 or fewer employees accounted for just under half of all job creations in Q1 2024 (50,116 out of a total of 101,767) this is down from a year ago when firms of this size made up over half (55.3%) of job creations (56,291 out of a total of 101,801).
Looking at job destructions, firms with up to 49 employees accounted for 62.9% of all job destructions in Q1 2024 (76,147 out of a total of 121122). This is an increase on Q1 2023, when firms of this size were made up 51.8% of job destructions (75,600 of 146,029).
The largest percentage change in proportion of destruction by firm size group was in the 1000+ category. This group made up just under 10% of destructions in Q1 2024 (11,894 of 121,122), down from just under a quarter of all destructions 12 months ago (34,347 of 146,029).
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