The ability of industry in the South-West to attract top accountancy and finance talent should only increase, Stuart Duncan, operations director at recruiter Morgan McKinley, tells Recruiter.
He also says that he “can imagine Bristol overtaking Birmingham” as a hub of industry and as such a location with demand for such workers.
Duncan was speaking following
his promotion last month from associate director to operations director for its accounting, finance & support sector, as a result of which his geographical responsibility spread from the firm’s Crawley, Guildford, Hertford and Windsor offices, to its Bristol and Cheltenham.
“Both sequentially and year-on-year we have seen double-digit growth in both the Home Counties and the South-West,” he tells
Recruiter, adding that as a market the South as a whole is “by far the most buoyant of the ones I’m hearing about”.
With “excellent universities such as Bristol” in the region, he says that a lot of accountants might train in the city before going to “live the big life in London”, and then four or five years on they realise they can have just as good a career in Bristol.
However, he notes that salaries are around 20% lower in the South-West than in the South-East and lower still than in London.
