The number of newcomers to the labor market has risen sharply in the first three months of this year, according to new figures from statistics bureaus CBS and Eurostat on Thursday. More people entered the labor market, but at the same time the number of jobs also increased.
In the past three months, more than 1.9 million people have started a new job in the past year. That is almost 400,000 more than in the same quarter a year earlier.
This concerns both people who (again) start working and people who have changed jobs. Among the newcomers are relatively many young people: more than four out of every ten workers with a new job were younger than 25 years.
The increase in the number of starters did not only apply to the Netherlands; in most EU countries, the total number of people in work grew strongly. Within the European Union, the percentage of newcomers to the workplace was highest in Finland, followed by the Netherlands.
Newcomers to the labor market are very welcome, because more and more jobs are also being created. As a result, the labor market remains tight. There were a record 451,000 vacancies in the first quarter of this year, while the number of unemployed fell to 338,000. There are 133 vacancies per 100 unemployed, the CBS reported earlier.
–
