These are the Best UK Cities Outside of London to Find a Job in Tech

There is no doubting that 2020 has hit employment hard. The pandemic has sadly seen many businesses having to close down, cut costs and make redundancies, and the unemployment rate has grown by 0.9% vs. the same period last year according to ONS figures.

At KO2 Embedded Recruitment Solutions our mission is to place talented people in positions across the electronics and embedded systems industry.

With the growing rate of unemployment in the UK, the Government has highlighted the importance of the tech industry as the future for much of our workforce. Tech roles of course include the areas of embedded systems which we specialise in but can also incorporate a wide range of jobs from social media marketing, to games development, and IT support.

With the pandemic also seeing rising figures of people moving out of London, we decided to conduct some research to help job-seekers within the wider tech industry find a role and know where to look – especially if you’re planning a relocation.

We scoured LinkedIn to analyse which UK cities have the most tech jobs, looking at which cities have the highest number of jobs as well as taking a closer look at where you are most likely to land a tech job based on the availability of jobs against the city’s population.

Coming out as the city with the most tech jobs outside of London is Manchester which had a total of 10,757 tech jobs advertised during our research, while not too far away Lancaster is where jobseekers have the greatest chance of landing a tech role with only 13.6 people to every position available.

Read on below for the full results.

The UK Cities Outside London with the Most Tech Jobs

The first step of our research was identifying which UK cities have the highest number of tech roles available.

The city that came out as having the highest number of tech jobs outside of London is Manchester; a city often hailed by some as the ‘Capital of the North’.

With big brand employers in Manchester including Siemens, Klarna, Kellog’s, and Amazon based in Manchester it’s perhaps not too surprising to see them in the top spot.

Some more surprising results include Cambridge in the second spot with 6,155 jobs – with the esteemed university providing great opportunities in the city, while Leeds came in third place with 4,400 jobs available – a proud achievement for a city which is pushing forward as one of the most vibrant places to live and work, and with companies such as Channel 4 setting up offices in the Yorkshire city.

The UK Cities Outside London with the Best Chances of Landing a Tech Job

The next step of our research involved digging a little deeper to find the UK cities where job-seekers are most likely to land a tech job. We did this by comparing the number of tech roles against the size of the population.

Coming out in the top spot as the city where you have the best chance of landing a tech role is the small, historic city of Lancaster.

The city has a population of just over 47,000 but one of the highest levels of jobs available at almost 3,500. This means there are only 13.6 people to every one job available  – making the market far less competitive.

Cambridge again ranked in second place, with the tiny cathedral city of Lichfield coming in at third place as perhaps the most interesting result of all. The city which has a population of just over 32,000 people had a perhaps surprising 1,026 tech roles available meaning only 32 people to every available role.

So if you’re looking for a place where the competition isn’t quite as fierce these cities are where you may want to look – but remember you’ll still need to bring your A-game.

Methodology

To conduct our research we compiled a list of over 50 different tech jobs spanning across a wide range of roles within the industry from developers, to technicians, to content creators.

We use the LinkedIn job search function to see how many jobs were available for each role in each UK city. We totaled the number of available jobs per city to get a total job count for each city.

To establish the cities with the greatest chances of securing a tech job we analysed the number of jobs available by the population size using the formula [population size/jobs available] to determine how many people there are to every one available job. The cities with the greatest chance of securing a tech job are those with the least people to each role available.

Full dataset available upon request.