Between 2023 and 2024, 1 in 3 unemployed people found a job
Between 2023 and 2024, 94.4% of employed people remained employed, 1.7% became unemployed and 3.9% became inactive. Employed people who remain in work do not all stay in the same job: about 350,000 of them changed jobs, or 7.5% of those who were employed at both moments. Furthermore, 40.8% of the unemployed remained unemployed, 31.3% found a job and 28.0% became inactive (i.e. not available for work and/or not actively looking for work). Among inactive people, 85.8% remained inactive, 9.6% found work and 4.6% became unemployed. This is what emerges from the latest figures of Statbel, the Belgian statistical office, on individual changes in the labour market status in 2024 compared to a year earlier.
This press release focuses on transitions on the labour market between 2023 and 2024 in a population of working age (15-64 years). The longitudinal nature of the Labour Force Survey allows to measure the dynamics on the labour market. For example, is someone who is employed at a given time still employed a year later, or has this person become unemployed or inactive?
Working and job mobility
The transition rate of employed people remains about the the same as the year before. Among the nearly 5 million employed people aged 15-64 in 2023, about 4.7 million remained in work in 2024, 82,000 became unemployed and 195,000 became inactive.
Employed people who remain in work do not all stay in the same job: about 350,000 of them changed jobs. This is 7.5% of those who were employed at both moments. This change of job can either be in the same or in another enterprise, or by starting a business. This percentage is comparable to last year, but clearly not yet back to the lower pre-Covid level of 5 to 6%. Jobmobility is higher among young people, in the Brussels and Flemish Regions, and among highly-skilled people and part-time workers. Men and women changed jobs equally between 2023 and 2024. Although the percentage of people changing jobs has remained more or less stable, the percentage of people staying in the same sector has decreased from 52.6% to 49.6%. We see that in education and healthcare, people most often remain in the same sector: more than 60% of those who change jobs stay in the same sector. More than half of the changes in construction, financial activities and public administration remain also within the same sector.
Unemployed
The most volatile group is unemployed people. However, we see that the percentage that remains unemployed is quite high (40.8%). This is also a large group in absolute figures: almost 120,000 jobseekers in 2023 are still looking for work in 2024 and are available to start working. 31.3% of them are in work a year later and 28.0% have become inactive.
Inactive
85.8% of the inactive (15-64 years) remained inactive in 2024. 9.6% of them are working and 4.6% became unemployed a year later. So of the 2.2 million inactive people in 2023, there are still 1.9 million inactive in 2024, including a large group of students who declared in the survey that they do not work.
Methodological information
The figures presented here are the results of the Labour Force Survey (LFS), a survey harmonised at European level. The definitions regarding employment and unemployment that are used are those of the International Labour Office (ILO) to allow international comparison. We distinguish three ILO statuses on the labour market: employed, unemployed and inactive. The definitions applied are available here.
Please note that temporarily unemployed persons are temporarily absent from work and are counted as employed.
The Labour Force Survey is a continuous survey, which means that the sample is spread evenly over the 52 weeks of the year. The selected respondents answer a questionnaire mainly related to their activity in the course of a given reference week. The respondents participate four times: they participate for 2 consecutive quarters, then don’t for 2 quarters, and then participate again for 2 quarters. This way, we can observe what the labour market status of a given respondent is in a given quarter, and a quarter and/or a year later: e.g. is someone who is unemployed still unemployed in the next quarter and/or year?
So, if one speaks of a particular status in a particular quarter, it is by definition the status in the reference week. If one indicates to work in the reference week of quarter Q and in the reference week of quarter Q+1, they are counted twice as employed. There are, of course, a number of cases that were unemployed in the meantime, for example, but this is beyond the scope of our data.
The quarterly transitions are the sums of weighted observations of respondents who participated in the successive quarters (e.g. 2019Q4-2020Q1, 2020Q1-2020Q2).
The quarter-specific annual transitions are the sums of weighted observations of respondents participating in the same quarter of two consecutive years (e.g. 2019Q1-2020Q1).
The annual transitions are the means of four quarter-specific annual transitions for two successive years (e.g. 2019-2020).
Respondents who did not participate in one of two waves (= interviews) cannot be taken into account in this analysis. Respondents in the longitudinal sample are in both quarters at least 15 years old and at most 74 years old.
The longitudinal sample is calibrated to the estimated distributions of ILO labour market status per age, gender, region, level of education and nationality in the start and end quarters.
The published figures are based on the Labour Force Survey. They are no exact figures but approximations based on the extrapolation of a random sample from the Belgian population. This must be taken into account when interpreting the results. When the unweighted number of people is lower than 30, data should be interpreted with caution.
Definitions
The level of education is measured using a detailed questionnaire, and the people are then divided into three groups.
Low-skilled people are people who list lower secondary education as their highest level of education. Medium-skilled people are people who obtained a diploma of higher secondary education but not of higher education. High-skilled people obtained a diploma of higher education.
What is the difference between permanent job and temporary job
People who have an employment contract of unlimited duration are considered to have a permanent job.
People who don’t have an employment contract of unlimited duration are considered to have a temporary job.