Digital skills is a key metric when understanding barriers for the digital economy. The data presented shows the areas of demand for digital roles through two metrics. The first is a count of the number of job postings by combined authority or growth region; this shows how strong the demand for digital skills is. The second shows the proportion of businesses that are advertising digital skills; this shows how broad the demand is.
Including two metrics is important as different areas will have differing sizes of labour market. The breadth of demand does not vary vastly but provides some indication on which areas have a broader adoption of digital skills. In York and North Yorkshire, 15% of jobs advertised in 2023 were digital roles. In comparison, in the West of England, 24% of jobs advertised in 2023 were digital jobs.
Across both metrics it is clear that there is strong and broad demand for digital skills in the West of England and West Yorkshire Combined Authorities.
Themes regarding the major employers in each area are presented below.
Digital Jobs are those that have occupations in SOC 21 or 31. This covers purely digital roles and the application of digital skills to occupations such as engineering.
Lightcast offer data on the number of job advertisements - which represents the demand for skills. It is unclear if all of the advertised positions are filled. Data is extracted for the period January - December 2023.
Lightcast data uses 2016 Local Authority boundaries and these have been aggregated to form Combined Authorities. There may be some minor inaccuracies in doing this mapping.
There has been a significant number of digital roles advertised across the West of England, Greater Manchester, West Midlands, and West Yorkshire in 2023. On the other hand, digital job postings tend to be lower in the Tees Valley and York and North Yorkshire.
Notes: Proportion of Firms Advertising Digital Roles by Combined Authority/Growth Region, January to December 2023. Digital Intensity is a measure of the proportion of companies advertising digital roles in an area. Specifically, Digital Intensity is the number of companies that have advertised a digital role in 2023 divided by the number of companies that have advertised any role in 2023.
