As a 25-year old that lived in Nottingham, studied in Newcastle and moved to Oxford to work as a Systems Engineer, this article is interesting, but it can simpl

As a 25-year old that lived in Nottingham, studied in Newcastle and moved to Oxford to work as a Systems Engineer, this article is interesting, but it can simply be summed up as London and the South in general is where the money is. I went away to study simply to have some freedom and it was great. I would have happily moved back to Nottingham to live and work, but there were just no jobs in my field. I finished uni with a 1st with Hons. and had some good background (jobs, published parts of some small books etc.) After months of searching, I got only one or two offers in Nottingham and one was for £16k. It wasn't until I expanded my search to the south that I finally started getting better offers and accepted one of £26k + bonus. Truth is, I was simply open to moving anywhere (like most grads), that means you just send out a load of CVs and see where comes back to you. Because a majority of big businesses are based in the South, there are more large companies that will make you good offers. In the north there's nowhere near as many businesses, so the likelihood of getting a good offer is slim when you're applying to the south as well. Something annoying is that the higher salaries are usually where higher priced rent/houses are, obviously because the salary will reflect the price of living in that area. In my mind, this means it can only ever get worse: the price of living keeps increasing which means salaries will keep having to rise to match, which means more grads flock to the area making it pricier and decreasing the price (or giving a lower increase rate) to the North as it becomes less desirable. Maybe eventually we'll all just live in the south and the north can finally just be for farming.