The Department Of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) has recently released its latest report on the Quarterly Employment Statistics 2023. This release breaks down labour distribution and job activity within the 3rd quarter of 2023.
The main highlight of the report is that jobs in the economic sector rose by 2.6 percent to record 8.90 million jobs in the third quarter of 2023. Out of this amount, about 8.71 million jobs were filled, or around 97.9 percent of all jobs in the sector.
As such, there is a 2.1 percent job vacancy rate, which translates to roughly 190.9 thousand jobs. In addition, 32.0 thousand jobs were created during this quarter.
Labour demand by skill
According to DOSM, the semi-skilled category made up the largest share of jobs, taking up 62.5 (5.56 million) percent of all jobs. This is followed by the skilled category with 25 percent (2.22 million). Low-skilled jobs only took up around 12.5 percent (1.12 million) of the total.
Overall, each category saw a minor increase in jobs created. Skilled labour saw a total of 9.2 thousand jobs created while semi-skilled saw the highest increase with 19.4 thousand new jobs created. Low-skilled jobs saw 3.3 thousand new positions created.
Labour demand by economic activity
Overall, it appears that most of all available jobs are being dominated by the services sector. According to the report, services make up around 52.5 percent of all jobs (4.58 million) respectively. Out of that number, around 4.60 million job positions were filled.
With regards to job vacancies, more than half of the vacancies were in the Manufacturing sector with a share of 56.5 percent (107.9 thousand), followed suit by the Agriculture sector with 16.0 percent (30.5 thousand), Services (13.6%; 26.1 thousand) and Construction (13.6%; 25.9 thousand).
It was also reported that about 49.8 percent of jobs created this quarter belonged to the services sector. This is followed by Manufacturing with 32.4 per cent (10.4 thousand) and Construction (12.7%; 4.1 thousand).
