Two key patterns emerge from the data:
- The employment rate for ethnic minority people – in Grampian and Scotland as a whole – tends to be lower than for Scottish/British people, despite ethnic minorities tending to have higher levels of education (see Education section below).
- Covid-19 led to widespread job losses in 2020; this affected different groups of people in different ways across Grampian and Scotland as a whole. Some of the hardest-hit groups was Grampian’s non-UK born ethnic minorities, whose employment rate dropped between 12 and 22 percentage points between 2019 and 2020. During the same period, the average employment rate across Scotland for this group actually increased slightly, though it was still the lowest in Scotland by 10 percentage points.
See also: Skills Development Scotland, Regional Skills Assessments, Aberdeen City and Shire, 2022 (link) and Skills Matrix (link). Aberdeenshire Employability Partnership (link), ABZ Works (link) and Moray Employability (link).