Understanding employment patterns and why they apply to me

This is a long one so grab a cuppa and learn about employment patterns with me..


Each week I take time out to sit at my desk in the office and write up some coursework. It’s a job that has to be done and is something I actually don’t mind doing as a lot of what I educate myself on to complete the work, then directly applies to my job.

One of the most recent topics I’ve been studying is employment patterns and how they have been changing over the years and why these changes have been happening.
The main focus being unemployment and how that has both risen and fallen over the last 5 years and so and why this is. Are businesses getting rid of staff? Are more staff leaving? Why are they leaving? How can we lower the unemployment rate?

So what are employment patterns?

There are different ways in which a person can be employed by a company, some are more popular than others at different times. The change in popularity and employment statuses cause ‘employment patterns’ and it is important for an organisation to recognise them.

Organisations are always looking to reduce their human resource cost and keeping up-to-date with current employment patterns can help them to do so.

A way of keeping human resource cost down that is becoming increasingly popular is by outsourcing support activities so that the organisation can concentrate on primary activities to expand the organisation. For example; the creation or delivery of a product or service.
At Seaside Creative, we outsource our graphic designer as we do not always need his services and so it is more cost effective to only pay for his services when we need them instead permanently employing him.

The increasing demand for outsourced services leads to previous employees setting up as self-employed contractors (freelancers), creating an increase in the number of self-employed people. This is a change of employment pattern as self-employment rates go up and employed rated go down.

From first-hand experience I know that my local Morrisons store in which I work has more part-time employees that full-time ones. In fact, the majority of full time employees are actually managers, with the exceptions of a few customer assistants that I know are on a full time contract.

Having more part-time staff increases flexibility for the store as staff often work different days every week in order to fill staff gaps in rotas.

Right next to my local Morrisons store a new Bizspace building has just opened and so this will encourage businesses to move to the area as well as freelancers and other self-employed people. The opening of this building will drastically change the employment pattern in my local area as more self-employed people move into the building. It may also encourage current residence to consider starting their own business as there is an office space available local to them. Encouragement will become even stronger when businesses in the local building are having great success.

So what are the impacts of employment pattern changes?

Well, it will impact decisions that young business people make when coming into their industry. Should they start alone or be employed to get their foot in the door first? I decided on the latter for this career move. But in the future, I will have to consider employment patterns again when I decide it’s time for a career change again.

After looking at the changing patterns of employment both globally and in the UK alone, I feel that if I plan to work abroad I will be very cautious as to what countries I go to. I am now aware that in many developing countries working poverty is a big problem and I may be subject to it if I choose to work in a country where rates are high. As well as the problem of unequal opportunities in countries such as North Africa and gender inequality in Southern Asia as more women than men are subject to vulnerable employment.

When researching about employment patterns, I came across the IFS. The IFS is an independent research institute and was launched with the principal aim of better informing public debate on economics in order to promote the development of effective fiscal policy.
The IFS Working Paper states that ‘Young adults five years after leaving education are still 1% less likely to be employed if they start out when the unemployment rate was 10% rather than 6%. Luckily for me, I was already in the labour market before I left education as I was working in the local pub when I was 17 and studying for my A Levels. As an apprentice, I am both in the labour market and in education so this statistic still doesn’t affect me as of yet. But may be something to consider in the future.

Try link this to the digital space then!
The digital space actually plays more of a crucial role than you may first think as it’s the digital technology that now allows people to have more flexible work forces as they can work from wherever they are.

Collaborative technologies such as Google Drive gives users the ability to access their files from wherever they are with just one Google account.
If technology like this didn’t exist then people would not have the capability to work for themselves are so many people often do now.

So who knows what the future holds, all we can do is educate ourselves and try to be as prepared for it as we can!