The average salary in Ukraine reached UAH 19.5 thousand at the beginning of 2024, which is 30% or UAH 4.5 thousand more than at the beginning of 2022, according to a study of job offers by Work.ua.
“Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the labor market has recovered by 93% in terms of the number of vacancies,” the study says.
According to the published data, in January 2024, employers published more than 91 thousand vacancies, which is 6% less than in December 2023, and 7% less than in January 2022, but about 11 times more than in March 2022.
It is noted that, compared to pre-war figures, the number of vacancies has increased the most in Zakarpattia (55%), Ivano-Frankivsk (46%), Khmelnytsky (25%), Lviv (23%), Vinnytsia (20%), Rivne (18%) and Chernivtsi (16%) regions.
Kyiv (30.9 thousand vacancies), Lviv (almost 8.5 thousand), Dnipropetrovs’k (8.45 thousand), Odesa (5 752) and Kharkiv (3 347) regions remain the leading regions in terms of the absolute number of job offers. These regions account for 63% of all vacancies.
In terms of growth by category compared to pre-war figures, the top 5 categories were medicine and pharmaceuticals (+26%, to 6 thousand offers), education and science (+23%, to 4.8 thousand), security and safety (+22%, to 2.3 thousand), law (+13%, to 1.8 thousand), and retail (+9%, to 12 thousand).
At the same time, in 19 categories, there were fewer job offers in January 2024 than in January 2022. IT, computers, and the Internet are the slowest to recover.
Research by Work.ua shows that Ukrainians want to work remotely: in January 2024, there were already 3% more remote work offers (6.2 thousand) than in January 2022.
It is emphasized that there are many more vacancies in the public sector – in non-profit, charitable and public organizations: if in January 2022 there were 100 of them, now their number has exceeded 1100.
In addition, the number of vacancies for veterans has tripled. At the same time, such job offers still account for 7% of the labor market.
Also, since January 2022, the number of vacancies for pensioners has doubled (about 4% of the labor market). For people with disabilities, the number of job offers increased by 22%, and for students – by only 1%.
“Changes in the country’s life have also affected the labor market. Thus, professions that were not previously available on Work.ua have appeared on the site. First of all, these are specialists of the Defense Forces: combat medic, grenade launcher, mortar gunner, drone pilot, etc.”, the study states.
It is emphasized that there is a demand for mental health in society: an increase in vacancies can be seen for psychologists (+136% in January 2024 compared to January 2022) and psychiatrists (+129%).
There is a growing demand for rehabilitation specialists and doctors: massage therapists (+69%), nurses (+67%), cardiologists (+67%), rehabilitation therapists (+58%), surgeons (+56%), nurses (+51%), and dental assistants (+44%).
The forced migration of Ukrainians abroad has spurred demand for teachers of English (+40%), Polish (+69%), German (+93%), French (+200%), and Spanish (+218%).
The full-scale invasion affected the work of employees in the tourism, shipping, and construction sectors, so there were fewer jobs for tourism managers (-62%), crewing managers (-56%), architects (-54%), interior designers (-53%), and 1C analysts (-55%) due to the rejection of Russian software.
The biggest drop in job offers is in the IT sector: Front-end developer (-81%), back-end developer (-75%), tester (-63%), etc.
Work.ua experts said that the rejection of the Russian language has affected the labor market, and in January 2024, the vast majority of vacancies, namely 96%, were in Ukrainian.
