Between the first quarter of 2021 and the same quarter of 2022, the occupation (according to ISCO) that saw the sharpest percentage increase in the number of employed people in the EU was food preparation assistants, with a 25.1% rise, jumping from almost 1.1 to almost 1.4 million people.
The second-largest increase, 15.6%, was in the personal service workers group, which relates to travel attendants, conductors, guides, cooks, waiters and bartenders, hairdressers, beauticians, and building and housekeeping supervisors. In Q1 2022, this occupational group had 7.6 million workers.
Information and communications technology professionals came in third, with a 9.6% increase from Q1 2021 to Q1 2022. Between these two quarters, this group (that relates to software and applications developers and analysts and database and network professionals) increased from 4.1 to 4.5 million people.
Source dataset: special LFS data extraction
There were two occupational groups with a 9% increase in the number of workers from Q1 2021 to Q1 2022: legal, social, cultural and related associate professionals (+9.4%), as well as hospitality, retail and other services managers (+9.1%). In Q1 2022, these groups counted with 3.5 and 2.4 million workers, respectively.
Next on the list of leading occupations with the sharpest percentage increases in the number of employed people were business and administration professionals (+7.4%), handicraft and printing workers (+6.7%), information and communications technicians (+5.9%), science and engineering professionals (+5.7%) and production and specialised services managers (+5.3%).
By contrast, agricultural, forestry and fishery labourers recorded the most sizeable decrease in the EU from Q1 2021 to Q1 2022 (-12.6 %).
For more information:
- Statistics Explained article on key figures on the changes to the labour market
- Statistics Explained article on EU labour market - quarterly statistics
- Statistics Explained article on labour market flow statistics in the EU
- Dedicated section on the Labour Force Survey
- Database on employment and unemployment (LFS)
Methodological note:
- Only occupations with more than 100 000 employed people at the EU level have been taken into account.
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