State of market - South coast - Bournemouth/Southampton?

[Jog On]

The Mrs and I have finally decided to quit London and move to the South coast, particularly Bournemouth/Boscome/Branksome/Poole type area.

Anyone based down there and contracting locally(ish)?

What's the water like for contracting? Specifically BA type roles in cloud/infrastructure/virtualisation type of projects...

[Sausage Surprise]

I would check out the train times to London (or Basingstoke)

[amcdonald]

I would check out the train times to London (or Basingstoke)

WHS

Apart from New Media agencies and jobs at Chase, Siemens/Plessey there's not a lot of IT stuff down there

Best to commute into London, or live in London during the week

[Jog On]

I have - it's 2 hours just to get to Waterloo. Not really what I've got in mind. Imagine moving away from London just to spend 4+ hours a day shlepping there and back...

I'd like to know from anyone in the area already what the work opportunities are like without having to travel >1hr

[bobspud]

Don't expect to work down there, factor in a large commute back to London.

Rates are always grim for local roles.

[jamesbrown]

I have - it's 2 hours just to get to Waterloo. Not really what I've got in mind. Imagine moving away from London just to spend 4+ hours a day shlepping there and back...

I'd like to know from anyone in the area already what the work opportunities are like without having to travel >1hr

As others mentioned, your best bet is probably to commute or get something with a work-from-home element. Winchester, Basingstoke, Farnborough and Reading are all pretty do-able from Southampton at least. Bournemouth, while on the same line, would be a lot more painful IMHO. Brighton area is more do-able for London.

[kevpuk]

I live there, but current contract in Brentford......staying up in the week.
Locally, there is JPMorgan and LV= as probably the biggest household names, and Barclays have a decent office in Poole.....not much else, in terms of larger orgs. That said, having done permie-time at both JPM and LV= in the past, they do also use contractors.

Rate-wise, though, I have yet to come across anything that would interest me in the local area, but YMMV

[gingerjedi]

Usually plenty of security cleared stuff around the Salisbury area which isn't too far, I have no idea if they need/use BA's?

[Clare@InTouch]

I have a friend who worked in IT in London and recently moved here after getting a perm job at Accenture. There's one in Bournemouth and one in Southampton I believe.

I can't give you the specifics of what he does, but I do know it took him a long time to find anything and he was on the verge of giving up and moving back up to London when he got the role. I also know we don't have a lot of clients contracting locally unless they are in quite niche markets.