Bristolruns on a handful of strong industries. If you’re job-hunting or weighing a move, here’s where the opportunities (and the big-name employers) are.
Top industries & employers
Aerospace & advanced engineering
Airbus, Rolls-Royce, GKN Aerospace, Leonardo, Safran
Filton in north Bristol is one of Europe's largest aerospace clusters — Concorde was built here, and Airbus still designs wings for the whole group on the site.
Defence & government
MOD Abbey Wood, Defence Equipment & Support, Ministry of Defence
Abbey Wood houses the UK's defence procurement organisation with thousands of civil service and contractor roles, and it anchors a large security-cleared engineering labour market.
Technology & semiconductors
Graphcore, Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle, Dyson software teams
'Silicon Gorge' is a real cluster with unusual depth in chip design and hardware rather than only web software, grown out of decades of local semiconductor engineering.
Broadcast & animation
BBC Natural History Unit, Aardman Animations, Plimsoll Productions, Icon Films
The BBC's Natural History Unit is based here and makes most of the world's best-known wildlife television — a genuinely unique concentration of expertise found nowhere else.
Financial services & insurance
Hargreaves Lansdown, Lloyds Banking Group, Aviva, Computershare
Bristol has a substantial retail investment and insurance sector, with Hargreaves Lansdown grown from a local firm into a FTSE company headquartered in the city.
Higher education & research
University of Bristol, University of the West of England, Bristol Robotics Laboratory
The University of Bristol is research-intensive with particular strength in engineering and quantum, and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory is the largest of its kind in the UK.
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