A graph, representing a fall in the number of multimedia jobs in Australia last month has been likened to the flightpath of Mir, which crashed to earth last week.
The Olivier Internet Job Index shows a 15.8 percent decline in the number of jobs in the multimedia, Internet and graphics sector, the 11th successive fall.
"There are now less jobs advertised in these e-commerce/dot-com sectors than there were in December 1999; that's a follow on from the Nasdaq meltdown," according to Director of Olivier Recruitment Group, Robert Olivier.
"The Multimedia sector graph looks like the final flight plan for Mir, so steady and relentless is the descent. In May last year we found there were two and a half times more jobs in this sector than there had been just 6 months before, now there's 10 percent less than there were in December 1999," he said.
-The other sick man of the economy, the IT and Telecommunications sector, has dropped for the seventh time in a row, falling 7.1 percent in the last month."
"It's almost like there are two economies operating. Our figures show a 7.96 percent rise in non-tech jobs in March and a 7.58 percent fall in jobs in the IT and Multimedia sectors."
One sector showing notable improvement is Engineering and Mining where there's almost two and a half times the number of jobs that there were a year ago.
"The weak Australian dollar may be a factor in this," Olivier said.
"Our figures correlate very well with last week's Australian Bureau Statistics survey, which estimated 96,000 jobs available in February," says Bob Olivier. "Our research department counted an average of 92,755 jobs advertised on the Net each week in that month, and 94,502 in March."
"While the ABS suggests that there has been a 15.1 percent drop in job vacancies over the year, the IJI shows that Internet job ads are up 24.88 percent since this time last year, indicating enthusiastic take up of the technology."
"Newspaper ads are reported to have dropped 27 percent in the same period. There could be no better proof that cost effective Internet advertising has taken over as the way Australians companies recruit," Olivier said.
