Approximately 2,600 jobs were vacant on the Icelandic labour market in the second quarter of 2020 according to the results of Statistics Iceland Job Vacancy Survey. At the same time 198,700 jobs were estimated to be manned and the job vacancy rate therefore 1.3%.
Compared to the first quarter of 2020 the number of vacant jobs decreased by 300 jobs and the job vacancy rate remained the same. Compared to the second quarter of 2019, there were 3,600 fewer jobs vacant at present, and the job vacancy rate decreased by 1.4%.
When the number of manned jobs is looked at by quarters (figure 1) we see that there were 27,200 fewer jobs manned in the second quarter of 2020 than in the second quarter of 2019. Concurrently, the number of manned jobs has never been lower in the Icelandic Job Vacancy Survey, which was established in the first quarter of 2019. These results can probably be explained by the effects of Covid-19 on the Icelandic labour market.
| Measure | Value1 | Standard error2 | Lower interval3 | Upper interval3 |
| Number of vacant job positions | 2,600 | 600 | 1,500 | 3,700 |
| Number of job positions | 198,700 | 7,000 | 184,900 | 212,500 |
| Job vacancy rate | 1.3 | 0.3 | 0.7 | 1.8 |
1 Numbers are rounded to the nearest hundred.
2 Standard error of a measure refers to the variance in measures between samples.
3 The upper and lower interval of a measure refers to the range of the confidence interval around the measure. In repeated samples, the population value will fall within the confidence interval in 95% of cases.
Methods
The Icelandic Job Vacancy Survey is a sample survey, performed quarterly amongst legal entities in Iceland. The population consists of all legal entities in the Icelandic labour market that on average employ at least one individual annually. The sample is conducted once every year, in the beginning of the year, from a sampling frame of all legal entities from the year before. The reference date for the second quarter of 2020 was May 15th and the response rate was 95%.
Information about the population of legal entities are received by Statistics Iceland over the course of the first few months of the year. Due to this fact, the numbers from the first quarter of the year can change, when the weights are recalculated with better data about the population. This means that the numbers from the first quarter each year can be expected to change slightly when the numbers for the second quarter are published. In accordance with this, the numbers for the first quarter of 2020 have now been updated.
Additionally, the job vacancy activity breakdown for the travel industry and related activities and fishing and aquaculture activities has been updated to ensure consistency with other published numbers from Statistics Iceland. The activity breakdown is now in consistency with the classification by the framework regulation integrating business statistics.