Belfast Job Market

Belfast is a variant and bustling city with great reputation of very high living standards. 2003 quality of life survey mentioned Belfast as the best city in UK to live in. It contains approximately 15% of total population of Northern Ireland. Job market in Belfast is very much competitive as more than 60% of total populations of the city are working adults and keeping pace with UK’s national average unemployment rate, it has only 7% unemployed population. 

According to an estimate, by the year 2016, more than 51000 new jobs will be created by the new bases of well established business, their expansions and by the new businesses. 

Even though, previously, Belfast was famous for many industries like tobacco production, shipbuilding, heavy engineering, linen weaving, the recent job market in Belfast reflects job trends of other cities of Britain with a great number of individuals working in skilled trades and service industries. The majority of current Belfast population works for software development and IT firms, healthcare, construction, different financial services companies like banking and insurance, both through recruiting agencies and direct employments. In actual fact, the largest single employment sector in Belfast is Social and Health Care, creating employment opportunities for more than 30,000 people in the town.

Belfast Job Market (Image Reference)

Thus now, Job market in Belfast has so many industries including Social and Health Care, Hotel and Catering, Light industry, IT, Sales, Retails, Finance, Administration, Multilingual, Engineering and so on.  There has been a great expansion in the retail sector as in the last couple of years employers in this industry  has continued hiring more and more employees with comparatively higher pay rates. But majority of the employers in this industry specially search for candidates with great fluency in German and Dutch.

The Information Technology industry in Belfast too started to grow very fast with a huge number of job opening for candidates having skills in Cisco, Avaya, .Net, SQL server, Unix, Java and application support experiences. But the candidates with all these skills are very short in supply in the present Belfast job market.   So, if you are a candidate with any of the above mentioned skill set, try to search for unlimited IT job in Belfast. Simply search for “IT Jobs in Belfast”, you will find plenty of jobs that fits your skills. But an important point worth considering in Belfast job market is that many candidates are opting for so many instances stay in a career where they are now as the economy is still recovering. Therefore, the short supply of qualified candidates with above mentioned skills are very much likely to have better job security.

It is recently noticed that major companies in Belfast are going for temporary employees to have flexibility of using available resources. Employers are also downsizing temporary employees with short notice whenever they are in any financial trouble.  Some employers are getting some of their jobs done cheaply through different online platforms where lots of quality yet cheap workforce are available. And these strategies are really forking for them to have best out of very small resources available to them. So, more and more candidates are looking for permanent positions. But finding a permanent position in any leading organization in Belfast is quite a tough job. Only candidates with unique skill sets and long experience have job security. 

The Belfast retail sector, assisted by a lower cost base and the exchange rate coupled with retail offerings and quality services, continues to take pleasure in a great footfall.  Belfast has enjoyed a smooth continuation of the previous success. This has created a great situation for Belfast, to a certain extent, where the recession is felt in other location of Northern Ireland.

There is a great difference in payment rates in different industries in Belfast and it varies more between men and women performing almost the same jobs. The average salary for an employee in Belfast is approximately £27,515 p.a.