Cleaning and shop jobs most common

The top five largest single occupational groupings include 1.1 million sales and retail assistants, 600,000 cleaners and domestics and 450,000 kitchen and catering assistants, said the Jobs Economist consultancy.

The three occupations which have expanded most over the past three years are taxation experts (up 88 per cent to 34,000), advertising accounts managers and creative directors (up 75 per cent to 33,000) and window cleaners (up 73 per cent, to 47,000).

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The occupations which have contracted most over the past three years are debt, rent and other cash collectors (down 52 per cent to 20,000), TV, video and audio engineers (down 46 per cent to 6,000) and insurance underwriters (down 45 per cent to 20,000).

Dr John Philpott, director of the Jobs Economist, said: "It's clear that so-called 'knowledge work' is firmly on the rise, requiring a high level of professional and technical skill and offering decent pay prospects.

"Yet equally apparent is a substantial bedrock of low-skill, low-wage service work which accounts for the UK's relatively high incidence of low pay, with around one in five employees earning less than the commonly used low pay threshold for developed economies.

"While with considerable justification we like to portray ourselves as a nation of increasingly better educated and skilled professionals, we could also reasonably be described as a nation of shop assistants, cleaners and restaurant or cafe washer-uppers."

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Cleaning and shop jobs most common