Southland has been New Zealand’s most dynamic economic engine in recent years, which makes for a buoyant employment market. With the right skills, opportunities to enjoy a real career are plentiful, as they are if you are thinking about starting your own business. And because you have time to enjoy life outside work, building a career is simply more rewarding. What’s more, traveling to work usually takes most people no more than 10 minutes and traffic jams are virtually unheard of in these streets, designed in 1850 to be wide enough to turn a full bullock team.
New Zealand Aluminium Smelters, Alliance Group Ltd and the Southland District Health Board are among the largest employers, however, like the rest of New Zealand, Southland is very much a land of small and medium-sized business.
Engineering firms are everywhere, specialising in different niche aspects from building giant vats for the growing wine industry, to trailers for heavy transport; this is the land of innovators. A quarter of the Southland workforce is involved in manufacturing, 12 per cent work in retail and 8.6 per cent in health and social services.
Ongoing vacancies exist for people with the right skills, mainly in the engineering, trades, health, road freight, tourism and agricultural sectors.
