I was chatting to my contact, Joe, who works with Totaljobs last week about the number of jobs created by London Olympic projects (they are expecting increases in searches across construction jobs and engineering jobs as well as number of other areas).
I had vaguely thought about pulling together some blog posts/articles to see what’s being discussed. Well, Joe has saved me the work by getting a number of up to date articles on the very subject. So, if you are interested in keeping up to date with current thinking on this topic here you go:
- IT sector given temporary shot in arm from Olympics job boost
- 1,000 government ICT jobs from Olympics
- Can the 2012 Olympics be the bait to get more people into construction?
- London 2012 Olympics could create more graduate jobs
- London 2012 Olympics to Create more than 5,000 IT Jobs
And, looking at the other side:
2012 London Olympics won’t win any medals for providing jobs
I’m sketchy on my sources here as it was ages ago, but there was an event a couple of years ago now addressing the Olympics and they were saying that (in construction at least) it actually accounts for something like less than 1% of construction output. And I think that was even just in London, not actually the UK as a whole.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s a huge project, but the impact of it is not nearly as big as you might think.
I live around the Olympic site and I speak to a lot of construction workers and engineers who work there.
From chatting to all the people I know there, the general consensus seems to be once the site’s built, a few will manage to get placements to re-develop the stadium for West Ham after, some will head into the city to work on the Pinnacle tower that’s it. Then back to looking for other big projects around the country.
I should add, this is only from talking to construction workers and engineers. The major Shard works at London Bridge will be finishing around a fairly similar time, so there will be a lot of engineers looking for work around that time.