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 two visualisations are counts of the number of digital job postings; this shows the strength of demand for digital skills. The following two show 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.
Digital intensity shows how many companies in an area are hiring for digital roles. It's calculated by dividing the number of companies that advertised at least one digital job in a year by the total number of companies that advertised any job in that year (January - December).
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, and January - December 2024.
Lightcast data uses 2016 Local Authority boundaries and these have been aggregated to form Combined Authorities. There may be some minor inaccuracies due to this mapping.