Liverpoolruns 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
Life sciences & infectious disease
Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, The Pandemic Institute, Unilever R&D Port Sunlight, Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, Evotec
The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, founded in 1898, was the first institution of its kind anywhere in the world — a direct consequence of being a port that traded with the tropics. The cluster around it is one of the strongest infection and materials research bases outside the golden triangle.
Video games & interactive
Firesprite (Sony), Lucid Games, Ripstone, d3t, Sumo Digital
Liverpool has made games continuously since Psygnosis in the 1980s, which became Sony's Studio Liverpool. When it closed, the people stayed — Firesprite was founded from that talent pool and bought back by Sony in 2021. It is a small industry with an unusually long institutional memory.
Maritime, ports & logistics
Peel Ports, Liverpool2 container terminal, Cammell Laird, Bibby Line Group, the Manchester Ship Canal
Liverpool2, the deep-water container terminal opened in 2016, can take the largest ships afloat and moved the centre of gravity of Atlantic freight north. Cammell Laird across the river in Birkenhead still builds and refits ships, including the polar research vessel Sir David Attenborough.
Health & hospitals
Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Alder Hey Children's, Liverpool Heart and Chest, Liverpool Women's
The new Royal Liverpool University Hospital finally opened in October 2022, eight years late, after its original contractor Carillion collapsed mid-build — a story every Liverpudlian can tell you. Alder Hey and the Heart and Chest are national specialist centres in their own right.
Film, television & music
Liverpool Film Office, Lime Pictures, the Liverpool Philharmonic, LIPA, Beatles-related tourism
The Liverpool Film Office was the first of its kind in Britain when it opened in 1989, and the city is the most-filmed place in the UK after London — its Georgian streets stand in for New York, Moscow and Victorian anywhere. Eurovision 2023 was staged here at three months' notice on behalf of Ukraine.
Higher education
University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores, Liverpool Hope, LIPA, Edge Hill (Ormskirk)
The University of Liverpool is one of the original red bricks — it is literally the building the term was coined about. LIPA was co-founded by Paul McCartney in 1996 in his own former school, which tells you something about how the city recycles its history.
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