After rapid gains last year, employment growth in the financial services industry looks poised to plateau in the next three months, according to the findings of the latest the quarterly Morgan & Banks Job Index.
After rapid gains last year, employment growth in the financial services industry looks poised to plateau in the next three months, according to the findings of the latest the quarterly Morgan & Banks Job Index.
It shows that employers are less confident about job creation in the first quarter of this year than they were in the final quarter of 1999.
The study found that 46 per cent of employers in the financial services and insur-ance sector plan to increase their head count while 11 per cent expect to reduce it. This gives a net effect of 34 per cent — down on the 39 per cent recorded in the previous survey.
The results were similar on a general level with 38.1 per cent of all employers in-tending to hire new staff during the quarter and 12 per cent anticipating lay offs. The net effect of 26.2 per cent is 1.4 percentage points lower than in the previous survey.
Figures in the previous survey were the highest since the index was created in April 1995. But Morgan & Banks chairman Geoff Morgan does not believe that job creation has peaked.
“The demand is just too great. There are too many areas struggling to hire talented people — like the media, technology and telecommunications sectors — because the impetus of the economy is too strong,” he says.
One possible reason for the dip, he says, could be that “everyone was just tired at the end of the year” (when much of the survey was done). The Millennium was ending, Y2K fears abounded and employers were re-assessing what they were do-ing, he says.
Nonetheless, Morgan says the latest survey shows that the full employment spoken about in some quarters is still a pipe dream.
