Who's being made redundant during COVID? Who is staying at work. And is it any different from usual?

Last week's post looked at trends in redundancies over the COVID period relative to previous downturns. It may also be helpful to get a sense of just who is being laid off and whether this is any different from a "normal" recession. Many factors are associated with the risk of layoff, but two features that often get a lot of attention are age and skills. Essentially, UK redundancy law ensures that younger people are easier and cheaper to fire, (because they will have been with a firm for a shorter amount of time, on average). Also people with fewer skills are cheaper to fire, (because they get paid less, on average, and the amount of redundancy pay depends on how much a worker earns prior to being laid off). But all that is, as economists are always saying, holding other things equal and in the UK labour market things are not always that equal.
Look at the left panel in Figure 1 below. The Figure uses Labour Force Survey, (LFS), data to track the percentage of the workforce in each age group who say they have been made redundant in the last 3 months, running from 2005 until August 2020. The Figure peaks at the onset of the last recession and rises again in COVID. Thankfully the peak is no more than 1% of the relevant population. But the thing to take home is that young people, (by young we mean under 35), appear to be only at greater risk of redundancy in big recessions. Outside of recessions, it seems young people may be less likely to be laid off than anyone else.¹ The COVID downturn is notable in that 16 to 24 year olds, in particular, are much more likely to have been laid off. This may have something to do with the sectors in which young people work being more badly hit than usual.²
The right panel does the same but for education levels. Here it is more apparent that redundancies, in whatever period, are less likely to happen for graduates and are instead concentrated among those with Level 4 and Level 3 qualifications. Those with Level 2 and Level 1 qualifications are also less likely to be laid off in "normal" times. Only in a deep recession does the chance of being laid off rise steeply for this group.
Figure 1. UK Layoff Rates by Age and Qualifications 2005-2020 Figure 2 tracks the percentage of the workforce of each of these same groups who leave their jobs voluntarily over the same period. The left panel shows that job quitting is the preserve of the young. This shouldn't be too surprising, since most attempts to find a good job occur when younger. The Figure also shows that quits are also much more seasonal among young people. The peak quitting season is Winter. However, the "quit-age-gap" narrows noticeably in recessions and the COVID recession is no exception.
In contrast, the incidence of job quits do not vary much by education, with the exception of workers with Level 1 or 2 education, quit rates are much the same for all other skill groups, whether falling in a recession or rising in a growth period. Level 1 and 2 groups however are much less likely to quit their jobs whatever the state of the economy. Once again however, COVID appears to be a leveler. All education groups are much less likely to have quit their jobs during COVID.
Figure 2. UK Quit Rates by Age and Qualifications 2005-2020

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1 ^↩According to the responses contained in the LFS.
2 ^↩Alas, the data on redundancies by industry are not available that would enable us to look at this.