The Labour Market in Rural Scotland: An Introduction

Round Up: This complements two Futureskills Scotland reports, The Scottish Labour Market 2002 and the Scottish Labour Market 2003, giving more specific information about Scotland’s rural areas. It covers a range of topics including employment supply and demand trends, projections to 2007, wages and comparisons of different labour markets in rural Scotland.

Rural Scotland is home to around 1.5 million people, or 30%, of the Scottish population. However, the rate of population decline is greater in rural areas, with a projected drop of 3% by 2016 as compared to a fall of 1% across Scotland. Around one-in-three of the rural population work in rural Scotland; of these, women make up slightly more than half of the total employed population.

The proportion of workers in rural Scotland employed in outdoor and manual industries such as agriculture, hunting and forestry, fishing, mining and quarrying is higher than in other parts of Scotland. Despite this, the occupations increasingly in demand are managers, senior officials, professionals, sales and customer service workers. Total employment is expected to remain broadly stable in rural areas, with growth confined to industries such as the service sector at the expense of the manufacturing sector.

Rural employers will require around 60,000 new recruits by 2007 to fill vacancies caused by employee retirement or movement to other jobs – it is predicted that substantial numbers of incomers will be needed to fill posts in the professional services, health, education and the service sector. Skills shortages, where there are insufficient numbers of suitably skilled workers, affected 1 in 30 workplaces, with rates highest in hotels, restaurants, real estate and construction. More than three times as many vacancies were deemed hard to fill in rural areas than in other parts of Scotland.

Average earnings in rural Scotland have been around 90% of the Scottish average for both men and women, though there has been strong growth in average earnings with women seeing the greatest growth. Qualifications in the working age population a comparable across Scotland. More details of the The Labour Market in Rural Scotland can be found in the Summary Report and the Full report.

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