Getting On Your Bike Why You Don’t Have To Move Around In Order To Get A Good Job
The UK government has said that it intends to encourage jobseekers to move to parts of the country where there is lower unemployment. The idea is to ease the mis-match between high levels of unemployment in many regions, and shortages of labour elsewhere. However, besides the point that there is no area of the UK with zero unemployment, there are significant questions to be asked about whether relocation benefits anyone. Moreover, since the appearance of Internet business, and opportunities to work from home in online jobs, does anybody now have to experience the stress of migrating to another area in order to secure employment?
Relocation may be more straightforward for certain people than for others. Perhaps younger people, without a family and don’t own a house, can quickly relocate to any part of the UK or abroad to take up a job opportunity. However in Britain, we have a custom that believes people should buy a house and settle down. Once somebody has purchased a home, it becomes a lot trickier to sell up and move somewhere else. There is the problem of finding a buyer, and the existence of chains, with buyers pulling out at any point in the process for any number of causes. Added to that is the difficulty of finding a property in the destination area. To cap it all, for people moving from unemployment blackspots to somewhere more prosperous, they may find that property prices are higher, leaving them struggling to take out a much higher mortgage.
We also need to consider the social implications of relocation; leaving your existing social contacts and being required to build up a fresh network of contacts in the new location. Moreover for those who have children, the problems will affect the kids, also. Their education will be disrupted, and they will need to depart from their friends and make new friends in an unfamiliar place. There is the headache of finding a school in the new area that is appropriate. It may not be possible to find schools that offer the same range of courses that your children were studying beforehand.
Some jobs also require their employees to frequently relocate. I recall a person who was a bank manager, and he was expected to relocate to to a remote village in Wales. His wife refused to go, and he turned down the posting. As a result, his previously promising career went flat.
So if people cannot find jobs in their own locality, what is the alternative to relocating? Internet business means that it is, to a great extent, immaterial where you work. For instance, what difference does it make what city or county I was in when I was writing the current article, or where anyone else is when they read it? I am able to work from home, doing whatever I can make money in, so effectively a new generation of online jobs has emerged, allowing enterprises to have dealings with their clientele in cyberspace.
So, perhaps the way to deal with unemployment is not for people to ‘get on their bike’ as the politician’s saying goes, but to go onto the Internet, and seek out the online jobs that may allow them to work from home. Some of these might require a modest investment, for training or capital. But in comparison, how much money is taken up by moving house – in house seeking, legal and survey costs, and so on? It is not likely that they will any less, and the social and psychological costs are possibly even greater.
For those who genuinely want to move to a different part of Britain for reasons unrelated to work, evidently they will still need to do so. Even so, given the opportunities to be had in Internet business, it is quite unnecessary to move to another area just to find employment opportunities.

