London bankers don’t want new jobs. Luckily, there aren’t any
Getting a new financial services job in London probably shouldn’t remind anyone of the fable of the fox and the grapes, but the city has been going through pretty tough times recently.
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The latest update to recruitment consultant Morgan McKinley’s London employment monitor, which tracks the number of new jobs to market in the City’s financial services sector, is pretty bleak, all things considered.
In Q4 2024, Morgan McKinley said the number of new financial services jobs in the London market fell to just 3,670. Barring a single other quarter, this was the the worst three months for the industry’s jobs market since 2017. That other quarter was Q2 of 2020, when the world ground to a halt due to an unprecedented global pandemic.
London’s bankers may not be too worried. In our bonus expectations and job market sentiment survey, financial services professionals based in the UK & Ireland (overwhelmingly in London) said they probably wouldn't be looking for jobs this year.
Just 28% of UK-based financial services professionals told us they'd be looking for new jobs, compared to 37% in North America and 56% in the GCC.
Poor bonuses may change things. In our bonus expectations survey, though, people who said they'll be looking for new jobs in London said they'd do so because of overwork. A sales & trading VP at Jefferies noted that while the firm is “doing a lot of business”, it was still “short on staff.” He said he was looking for a new job as a consequence, and added that "working conditions are pretty monotonous on a top-of-league-table desk."
Some told us the poor job market was stifling their enthusiasm. One London-based researcher for a middle-market firm said that the reason they were not looking for a new job was because they were "not sure [they] could find something better."
A London-based JPMorgan quant in his early 40s, on the other hand, said that he wasn't looking for a new job because he had started slowing down. He said he prefers stability over adventure, and wasn't worried about his job security. He also said that he was reasonably happy with his life, and didn't expect much to change.
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