The UK job market outlook for 2012 is already looking grim with the report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) stating 210,000 more people will be unemployed.

The main problem has been that much hope was put on the Private Sector offsetting the job losses in the Public Sector. The reality is that this has not been the case with much of the Private Sector apprehensive of there respective markets and so cautious with adding new workers. We should also not forget that the drop in the predicted growth in the UK for 2012, which now stands at an expected 0.4%, I believe this figure used to be around the 2% mark at one point.

The bad news does not stop there though, with the CIPD predicting that unemployment will keep rising to 2.9m by 2013 and entry level jobs being the most affected.

John Salt from Total Jobs also stated that there was a “deep structural problem” in the British labour market, as even specialist industries such as Engineering are struggling to recruit due to a skills gap.

The signs ahead are of course a concern and it will be a telling year of how our overall the economy will span out over the next 5 to 10 years, what is clear is that recruitment agencies will have to do a lot of ground work to get the jobs in and I can imagine these agencies will almost be falling over each other to fill these vacancies.

Recruitment agencies based inScotlandwere concerned as the Job market is losing momentum.

The Bank of Scotland said that although they had a rise in permanent staff for the 14^th month running this was at its lowest rate and on temporary staff it showed its first decline in over 2 years. The index used to gauge employment figures slipped to 51.4 from 53.9 (above 50 is a positive trend).

The other news coming out of Scotland is unemployment rate which showed for the first time a higher proportion of unemployed compared to the whole of UK. Scotland jobless rate is now set at 8.5% compared to the UK which is at 8.3%.

Reports such as these have meant First Minister Alex Salmond wants an urgent UK-wide jobs summit, with Salmond seemingly unable to defend his economic policies with as such conviction as previous months, previously able to point to Scotlands declining unemployment figures and having a positive effect of the jobless market figures. This now seems not to be the case and serious discussions need to happen to ensure the UK does all it can to try and come out of this recession.

Recruitment agencies in Edinburgh have recorded higher permanent placements and recruitment agencies in Aberdeen have been showing an increase in temporary staffing but overall the market is struggling and so a closer look at economic policies is needed to try and encourage any growth possible.

Recruitment agencies are preparing for a rough year as financial forecasters believeBritain’s economy will suffer next year, reducing by 1.3%. The news gets no better when referring to the Eurozone which they have predicted will reduce by 1.5%.

Economic problems have arisen in a number of EU countries and the Chancellor George Osborne has admitted if the rest of Europe slips back into recession it will be difficult for the UK to avoid. An even worst scenario would be the dismantlement of the single currency.

There was also talk by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) that the Bank of England will have another bout of quantitative easing to the amount of £125 billion, however there are also some reservations that we can not keep coming to this solution.

The job market in general is becoming very tight with many employers seemingly aware of the future uncertainty. Therefore they have either stopped recruiting all together or just hiring sporadically till the market becomes clearer. My view is that the Recruitment agencies will have to depend on strong employer relationships to ensure that they get any jobs out there but how tough the market will be, will very much depend on a number of economic factors.