American Contractors Working On Projects in The United Kingdom Post the Brexit Announcement.

Not only is the UK dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic, along with most other countries around the world, the country working on tying up loose ends when it comes to Brexit. Although they are working on leaving the European Union well before the pandemic, the process and the changes were supposed to take about two months to implement. While functionally almost everything in the UK stays unchanged, there are a few changes that have to take place. One of the significant areas where they are going to implement these changes is when it comes to working and finding jobs in the country.

Understanding unemployment in the UK is a complicated process since the beginning of the year saw unemployment in the UK as low at 3.9%, which is the lowest it has ever been in 40 years. At this point, it would have made a lot of sense for people from other countries looking for work to move to the UK. However, the Coronavirus pandemic threw a curveball at the UK, with the unemployment rates beginning to climb with many companies shutting down and high numbers of people out of work.

The country was supposed to finalise the changes relating to the Brexit move, by the end of the year. While the UK was just recoiling from changes that were caused because of the health of the people and the economy due to COVID-19 at the end of November, they learned of a new strain of the virus that was a lot tougher than the previous one. After the second national lockdown, everything was on hold, and people were not sure how they were going to respond to the ​faster spreading COVID-19 virus​. In response, the world finally closed borders on the UK to reduce the spread.

At the peak of this situation, ​finding work in the UK​, especially for people from the ​United States was quite challenging since most businesses and companies shut, while the ones that were running, were doing that remotely. On a side note, some positions needed a specific background check while others did not, and depending on the circumstance, people had to provide the information that their employers were asking for. These checks were quite common for people from within the country, however, they were a little challenging if they were to be done for someone who was not from the country. People from the US had a tough time since the process had to be coordinated with their embassy.

According to the ONS 2018, Business Register and Employment Survey based the largest sectors based on the number of employees

• wholesale and retail
• healthcare and social work
• administration
• education
• scientific and technical
• manufacturing
• Hospitality

However, people had to work on most of these tasks in person, and when the pandemic hit, people had no choice but to wait for things to get better. Many companies or businesses working in these lines had to automate and create simple systems that people could handle themselves. Others were considering automation for some time, but the changes caused due to the pandemic and the inability to hire people during the lockdown forced them to begin implementing immediately.

Amazon turned into one of the largest companies during the pandemic since it allowed people to coordinate a process themselves, making it a lot easier to get through without interacting with many others along the way. That’s not all, they were also open to hiring in the UK and providing options either as couriers for deliveries, or people working for the company.

There were a large number of people remotely working in the UK while setting up shop in the US, while there were others who were finding it difficult to get any work. While this might not have been the case a year back, the Coronavirus pandemic made some significant changes to the UK, and the country was working on solving them and ​building up their economy​. The most interesting part about contractors is that they could work in any department beneficial to them. They had to learn to pivot to another similar line of work since businesses and companies had no option but to only spend on what they needed.

According to a recent poll, the UK has about two million self-employed professionals, whether from within the country or other countries, working in the United Kingdom. 1.77 million are working as full-time contractors while about 234,000 are on a self-employed basis as their second job. Some of the industries that were seeing growth slightly before the pandemic were

• Manufacturing
• Automotive
• Engineering
• Design
• Construction

A lot of these tasks were pushed to the back burner since they meant coordinating in person. Another change when it came to hiring people was that companies and even clients in the UK were now interested in going through a background check to make sure they could trust the people they were working with. With the unemployment rate in the UK significantly high, it made sense for HR departments and employers to insist on a ​background checks​ to make sure the people they were getting in, did not have a criminal record in the past. Depending on the job that they were working, or the description that they had to get through, the background tests that they had to take varied. Some of these were basic, and others had to be coordinated with the police department to verify that the results were true. The main reason for the latter was making sure that the person joining the fold could be trusted and would be a good fit for the team.

When it comes to remote working since employers were not meeting the person who would be handling the work, they wanted to make sure that their information would be safe. Employers no longer had restrictions that insisted on hiring close to the office, with some of them were even hiring talent from overseas if they were a good fit for the company.