The number of people in jobs in Ukraine grew for the first time since 2013 in the first half of this year, the acting head of the State Employment Service of Ukraine Valeriy Yaroshenko said, Interfax reported on July 31. The number of employed Ukrainians went up by 0.9% y/y in the first six months of this year, Yaroshenko said.

"We are witnessing that the labour market is actually demonstrating some kind of stabilisation for the first half of 2018. The growth in the employment of the population … according to the state statistics, occurred for the first time since 2013," he told a news conference in Kyiv, cited by Interfax.

That is an increase of 149,000 people in work and brings the overall unemployment rate down slightly to 9.7% as of August 1. At the same time Yaroshenko said that a fifth (21.8%) of Ukrainians work in the grey economy, which is down slightly from a year earlier when 22.3% of workers were in the grey economy.

However, the country is still suffering from a labour crisis. "We have 304,000 people registered with the State Employment Service today," Yaroshenko said. According to him, 47% of them have higher education, and in employment centres in the cities of Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy and Lviv from 85% to 90% of the unemployed people have higher education.

"As of July 27, compared with the same date in 2017, the number of unemployment assistance recipients in the country is 23,000, which is 8% less than it was in 2017," he said.

The average amount of assistance payments is growing. Minimum assistance under the law is UAH544 ($20.23) per month, which is received by a quarter of the unemployed. The maximum support is UAH7,048 ($262.24) which is received by 5% of the unemployed.

As the economy starts to recover the number of new jobs is rising again, according to Yaroshenko, who said there are around 130,000 vacancies in service’s database.

Jobs in highest demand include locksmiths, electric welders, turners, bakers, drivers, salesmen, cooks, waiters, nurses, tractor drivers and agricultural machinery servicers.