Everyone’s Talking About…Being A Westie
Well not everyone, but our Premier Gladys Berejiklian certainly was last week when I attended the Western Sydney Business Connection State of the Region Address at the William Inglis Hotel in Warwick Farm. Gladys thinks it’s a great time to be a Westie. I do too. Here’s why…
Our Premier has recently returned from an overseas visit where 17 European companies (mostly German) signed a memorandum of understanding to set up in Western Sydney in response to the opening of our new Aerotropolis.
The Aerotropolis will create 200,000 new jobs for the area. It’ll make a huge impact on industries including Supply Chain, Procurement, Manufacturing, Transport and our exciting new Space industry hub (20,000 new jobs in itself).
Western Sydney will have a huge injection of funding. $93 billion will be spent in NSW in the next four years and a third of that will be spent in Western Sydney. Think Health, Transport, Education etc.
Interestingly a third of all jobs in NSW are located in Western Sydney and if you hang around me you’ll have heard (many times) that Greater Western Sydney is the third largest economy in Australia.
Celestino is building the $5 billion Sydney Science Park in Western Sydney in Luddenham. Their goal is to create an internationally recognised epicentre for research and development. It’ll be be a community that will create 12,000 knowledge based jobs, cater to over 10,000 students and behome to over 10,000 residents. It’ll have it’s own STEM School, the CSIRO Innovation Zone and ‘Urban Living Lab’, educational and medical research, international and local businesses. Apparently recent university graduates are targeting Western Sydney to work in the best Technology companies due to the funding and the exciting tech start ups populating our area. And on that note, there are now a selection of University campuses located out here too. Western Sydney is the focus for growth in high tech manufacturing, STEM and AI. There are great hopes (and serious investment clearly) for Western Sydney to be Australia’s Silicon Valley.
Looks like the future is now (sorry if that’s a bit over used?) in Western Sydney. Our entire business, social and urban landscape has changed since I moved here 17 years ago. We have better transport and access to other areas for a start, and that will keep growing. The jobs here compete in salary, benefits, opportunities and diversity with everywhere else in Australia. And hey, what about the people here? We’re pretty awesome too aren’t we?
Written by Erica Westbury Managing Director of Norwest Recruitment.
