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CONSULTING
Wolongong's Economic Pulse Check
Key Highlights
The Client
City of Wollongong
Their Challenge
A city changing so rapidly that its 10-year strategy risked becoming outdated.
Approach
Assess Wollongong’s economic resilience, future outlook and sources of growth.
Results
With updated data on employment and business growth - including insights into entrepreneurial activity - and the city’s strong potential to seize more opportunities in the knowledge economy and renewables sector - the team set new, more optimistic targets.
The Takeway
When conditions change, it pays to adapt and set new targets. Bring others with you on the journey. The Wollongong team focused on educating councillors about the city’s changing economic story. This is not an overnight task, but it’s essential to ensure decision makers and communities are equipped with the right information for the long term.
The Question
Halfway through its 10-year Economic Development Strategy (EDS 2019–2029), Wollongong City Council sought a data-driven mid-term review. They wanted to test whether job-creation targets and industry priorities set in 2019 – before COVID and other major shifts – still made sense.
Economic Development Manager Mark Grimson and his team, Emma Kilkelly and Ryan Cook, examined Wollongong’s economic performance and benchmarked it against peer cities. They wanted to understand:
- Had Wollongong’s post-industrial transformation accelerated since 2019?
- Was the local jobs deficit closing?
- Were emerging sectors translating into sustainable, higher-income employment?
Answering these questions would help determine whether the city needed to update its strategy for the years ahead.
The approach
.id undertook a comprehensive economic and labour-market analysis using small-area data from the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research (NIEIR), ABS and Tourism Research Australia, combined with .id’s proprietary datasets and economy.id modelling framework.
This analysis helped Wollongong make an informed assessment of:
- Headline economic performance: Gross Regional Product, employment, population trends and business dynamics
- Sectoral and spatial trends: growth of high-value industries, the expanding health precinct, industrial land use, and commuter flows
- Benchmarking: comparison with leading regional cities including Geelong, Sunshine Coast and Newcastle
- Scenario testing: revised forecasts under business-as-usual and high-growth scenarios to 2028.
Key Insights
The partnership unlocked several significant shifts in the city.
Economic resilience: Wollongong’s economy grew at 2.5% per year over the five years to 2022/23 – above the NSW average and three times the pace of the previous decade.
Higher-value employment: job creation is increasingly occurring in full-time, higher-income sectors balancing the continued strong growth in healthcare which is more likely to be part time. This reversed a decade-long trend of low-income job growth.
Business dynamism: registered businesses grew 14.4% between 2020 and 2023, outpacing the state average. The data showed this was driven by mid-sized firms and a rise in local entrepreneurship.
Persistent jobs deficit: despite strong performance, the city still has around 12,000 fewer local jobs than employed residents, with many people commuting to Sydney or neighbouring LGAs. 2025's Living in Australia report demonstrates that people almost always prefer to work locally when possible.
Hybrid work transformation: about one-third of residents worked from home in 2021, and our modelling suggested that in 2023 an extra 5,000 residents were taking advantage of remote working options compared to pre-COVID. This structural shift has reduced commuting and increased potential local expenditure.
Future Outlook
Economic modelling projects moderate growth in the near term before stronger gains next decade, supported by transformative projects such as:
• BlueScope’s Port Kembla Master Plan - a next-generation multi-industry precinct with potential for 30,000 jobs.
• UOW Health & Wellbeing Precinct - embedding research, education, and community facilities into a growing health cluster.
• Offshore wind and renewable energy zones - positioning Wollongong as a major clean-energy hub.
Impact
The review provided Council with:
• An evidence-based mid-term assessment aligned with state and national economic trends.
• Refined performance targets and metrics for the remaining EDS period.
• A strategic framework linking economic data to place-based opportunities—from industrial transformation to workforce inclusion.
The findings directly informed the implementation of a new EDS, which will underpin local investment decisions, and support future advocacy for the city.
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