Our research within this article is up to date as of our January 2022 study.
It’s safe to say that the 9-5 grind will never be the same. Since the pandemic, many businesses in the UK now offer remote and hybrid roles, which opens up a vast amount of opportunities for people all over the country to work with their dream company.
At Officeology, we wanted to find out exactly how many jobs are currently available in each industry and what percentage of these jobs are remote to learn which industries offer the most ‘work from home’ roles. To do this, we scraped every active job listing on Reed UK to find out which sectors and job roles offer the most work-from-home jobs and which sectors offer the highest percentage of work-from-home jobs.
Which Industries Offer the Most Work from Home Opportunities?
For our research, we only looked at permanent job listings for a more accurate result. Out of the 200,150 total full-time and part-time jobs we scraped, 12,655 of those were work from home, which equates to 6.3% of work-from-home jobs available in the UK.
The industry that currently has the most work-from-home job opportunities is IT & Telecoms, with 3,506 job listings, followed by Finance, with 993 work-from-home opportunities.
Interestingly, we also learned that Administrators (2,520 roles), IT Managers (2,200 roles), Software Engineers (1,782 roles), Business Development Managers (1,662 roles) and Project Managers (1,605 roles) had some of the highest work-from-home opportunities.
Which UK Cities Offer the Most Work from Home Opportunities?
Despite the fact that working from home means you can work from anywhere in the country, we also wanted to learn which cities offered the most work-from-home opportunities. This was calculated based on the population of the cities and where the head office was located.
London came out on top with 3169 work-from-home jobs available. This was followed closely by Manchester with 829 jobs and Birmingham with 666 jobs. On the lower end of the spectrum, Oxford only offered 105 work-from-home jobs, and Leicester had just 103 work-from-home opportunities.
Which UK Cities Offer the Most and Least Job Opportunities to Local Claimants?
With the current cost of living crisis and a potential recession looming in the UK, according to the ONS, ‘the number of job vacancies in June to August 2022 was 1,266,000, a decrease of 34,000 from the previous quarter and the largest quarterly fall since June to August 2020.’ Understandably, this is a scary time for all, whether you’re employed or unemployed.
So, looking at the most recent ONS figures of claimant counts per unitary and local authority, which consisted of claimants of Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) and some Universal Credit (UC) Claimants, we compared the number of local claimants to the corresponding city’s number of job listings. Rather than only looking at permanent job roles, we also took into account temporary and contract roles, to ascertain how many jobs are available per claimant, and how many more are needed to close the unemployment gap.
Our research revealed that Westminster currently offers the least job opportunities to the unemployed, with a total of just 239 jobs available, this means, for this city, that a huge 92.28% additional jobs are needed to close the gap.
On a positive note, Cambridge took the top spot for the city with the most job opportunities with 2,431 available jobs and 2,055 claimants, meaning technically, there are 1.18 jobs available per claimant. However, this study did not take into account the job sectors or skills required to apply in the first place.
Methodology:
The data for this research is correct as of 16.09.2022. We used the top 100 most popular job roles in the UK from My Salary and the 100 most populated UK cities from World Population Review to determine the total work-from-home opportunities currently available.
Claimant Counts were sourced from the Office for National Statistics’ most recent dataset published on 13th September 2022.