Across the EU, employers in construction, healthcare, transport and technical trades are reporting growing difficulty finding the right people. But how do you tell whether recruitment difficulties point to a genuine labour shortage? Cedefop's new indicator, based on online job advertisement data collected via the joint work with Eurostat through the Web Intelligence Hub, offers a data driven answer.
The new real-time occupational shortage indicator scans millions of online job advertisements (OJAs) across the EU-27 to flag occupations showing early signs of potential recruitment difficulty. Each occupation receives a score between 0 and 1: the higher the score, the stronger the signal of a potential shortage.
What makes it different
Unlike employer surveys, which can reflect subjective perceptions or interest-driven reporting, this indicator is built entirely from observed labour-market data. It combines several signals at once:
changes in demand for a role,
changes in demand relative to changes in employment for a role,
shifts in the (digital) skills employers ask for,
indications of recruitment difficulty signalled by the duration of an online job advertisement staying online, and
employers' recruitment strategy adjustments — such as posting more vacancies in a non-national language to widen the applicant pool.
It also goes further than most tools in one important respect: granularity. Rather than grouping roles broadly (for example, "health professionals"), the indicator distinguishes between over 300 individual occupations — separating, say, nursing professionals from generalist medical practitioners or pharmacists. This allows for far more targeted monitoring of where pressure is building.
Because it draws on near real-time online vacancy data, the indicator can also function as an early-warning mechanism, helping policymakers respond as economic and technological conditions shift, rather than after the fact.
Where the pressure is building
Early results point to medium-skilled, manual and elementary occupations (ISCO groups 6–9) as showing the highest scores, with several roles in healthcare, education, construction, driving and technical trades (ISCO group 7, craft and related trades workers) ranking prominently.
Why it matters for policy
Reliable, granular shortage signals are a building block of evidence-based policymaking — supporting the design of targeted education and training measures, active labour market policies, and migration-management responses. By bypassing the biases of self-reported data, the indicator helps policymakers distinguish genuine skill constraints from shortages rooted in unattractive wages or conditions — a distinction increasingly relevant to EU competitiveness, job quality, and labour-market debates.
Part of a wider intelligence suite
The indicator complements Cedefop's existing skills intelligence tools — the Skills Forecast, the Labour and Skills Shortage Index, TalentGap and the European Skills Index — together building a fuller picture of current and future EU labour market trends.