Which are the
best industries
for job security

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when it comes to the industry with the best job security, the jobs that sit within this field are all vital necessities for daily life.

It’s no wonder then that the agriculture, fishing, and utility industries appear to have the lowest overall redundancy rates, with just 5050 over the entirety of 2021.

In fact, this industry is seemingly so secure that the next best sector for job security, public administration, and law jobs, saw 12,456 redundancies over the course of the year: that’s more than double.

Education and other miscellaneous services are also hotspots for job retention, seeing only 18,758 and 22,557 redundancies respectively, as is the transport and storage sector with a reasonably low 23,390.

But how accurate is this data?

While these figures do display the overall level of redundancies in each sector, they don’t actively display these redundancies in comparison to each sector’s size.

When this is taken into account, the top sector for job security actually appears to be human health and social work jobs. This industry has a redundancy rate of 1.43, closely followed by education, with a rate of 1.49.

Public admin and law also appear to be the third most secure sector, holding a redundancy rate of 1.77.

But we then see a substantial drop, with job security rates sitting at 3.51 and 3.65, when it comes to professional, scientific, and technical roles and the agricultural, fishing, and utilities sector.

With the best and worst sectors for job security in mind, let’s now turn our attention to which UK regions have the best job security.

Interestingly, it would appear that Northern Ireland might be the best location to seek secure employment, with a redundancy total of just 7,579.

That’s almost half that of the second most secure area, the North East, which had just 14,663 redundancies in 2021.

Other secure UK regions include Wales, with a low 15,218 job losses, Scotland, with only 26,431, and the East Midlands, with just 28,473 redundancies.

In terms of redundancy rates, things appear to be very similar. Northern Ireland retains its top spot for low redundancies with a rating of 2.55, followed closely by Scotland and Wales, who scored a rating of 2.81 and 3.00 accordingly.

In comparison to secure job locations across the UK, the regions for the worst job security in the UK appear to have excessively high redundancies.

The South East of England could be considered the worst for job security, making 72,324 of their staff redundant in 2021, closely followed by London, which saw 66,844 redundancies over the course of the year.

Other insecure regions include the East of England, which saw 43,636 redundancies, alongside the North West, which suffered 42,542 job losses. Topping out the bottom five UK regions for job security is the South West, with 42,201 job terminations.

Things appear much the same when we look at redundancy rates as well. The South East, South West, and London all scored exceptionally high, offering redundancy rates of 4.65, 4.59, and 4.22 for 2021.

The data looks at redundancies across the UK data collated from ONS. The industries were then ranked from lowest to highest, based on the number of actual redundancies, and the redundancy rate

To find the redundancy rate Reassured took into account the number of people aged 16 or over, who were made redundant

The data shows the redundancies across the UK between January 2021 and December 2021, for both actual and ratio values, split by industry. Actual values show the true number of reported redundancies, whereas ratio values take into account the size of each industry, to allow for a fairer comparison

The redundancy rate is the ratio of the redundancy level for the given quarter to the number of employees in the previous quarter, multiplied by 1,000