Recent economic and labour market trends in Northern Ireland

This chapter provides an overview of recent economic and labour market trends in Northern Ireland. While the 2008 economic crisis hit Northern Ireland particularly strongly, since 2015 the overall economy has seen improvements on a number of economic and employment indicators. Notably, the unemployment rate of 4.7% is very close to the UK average. Recently, Northern Ireland has introduced a new strategy to increase the number of people participating in apprenticeship programmes. Overall enrolment in apprenticeship has increased since 2012 reaching 6 500 registrations in 2016-17.