Digital skills is a key metric to understanding barriers to the digital economy. The data presented shows the areas of demand for digital roles through two metrics.
The first is a count of the number of job postings by combined authority or growth region; this shows the strength of demand for digital skills. The second shows the proportion of businesses that are advertising digital skills; this shows the breadth of the demand. Including two metrics is important as different areas will have differing sizes of labour market.
Notes: Digital intensity refers to the proportion of firms advertising digital roles by combined authority/growth region, from January to December 2023. Digital Intensity is a measure of the proportion of companies advertising digital roles in an area. Specifically, Digital Intensity is the number of companies that have advertised a digital role in 2023 divided by the number of companies that have advertised any role in 2023.
Digital Jobs are those that have occupations in SOC 21 or 31. This covers purely digital roles and the application of digital skills to occupations such as engineering.
Lightcast offer data on the number of job advertisements - which represents the demand for skills. It is unclear if all of the advertised positions are filled. Data is extracted for the period January - December 2023.
Lightcast data uses 2016 Local Authority boundaries and these have been aggregated to form Combined Authorities. There may be some minor inaccuracies in doing this mapping.