How are these figures worked out? What is a "Normalised Availability Index"?
Our indexes are designed to make it easy to compare trends in the job market, across sector, from Month-to-Month. Care is taken to eliminate seasonal trends and other variations in data from these indices.
We process hundreds of thousands of jobs every Month, enabling us to use all this data to generate a Normalised Index. For example, the Normalised Availability Index is generated by analysing the number of new vacancies for each sector passing through our search engine. The figures are divided by the total volume of new vacancies and then normalised using the average Monthly sector volumes.
This allows you to easily view a sector trend and compare the Monthly changes to other sectors, rather than comparing absolute volumes (this helps avoid biases).