Jobs and Careers in Cleethorpes

Cleethorpes is the Humber’s seaside resort, with a pier dating from 1873, a long promenade and a seafront economy of cafes, arcades, bars and holiday accommodation. Just under 30,000 people live in the town, but it’s physically joined to Grimsby, and that matters more for careers than the resort itself. Cleethorpes’ own job market is heavily seasonal and dominated by hospitality; Grimsby’s, a short bus ride away, is built on seafood processing, ports and a fast-growing offshore wind sector.

The visitor economy

The scale of tourism here is easy to underestimate. North East Lincolnshire Council’s figures put Cleethorpes at around 8.59 million visits in 2022, with more than 600,000 of those visitors staying five days or longer, over £636 million spent in the resort that year and roughly 2,600 full-time-equivalent jobs supported as a result. Those are figures for a single year, but they show how much of the local economy depends on people coming to the coast.

The work that generates is what you’d expect of a seaside town. Bar and waiting staff, chefs, housekeeping, arcade and attraction attendants, lifeguards, retail assistants and the cleaning and maintenance teams that keep the seafront running. Haven’s Cleethorpes Beach holiday park, the site formerly known as Thorpe Park Holiday Centre, is the single largest leisure employer in the town, with restaurants, bars, pools, activity centres and entertainment venues all needing staff, and its outdoor attractions run from the May half term through to the August bank holiday, which is a good guide to when seasonal recruitment peaks. Pleasure Island theme park closed in 2016, so the holiday park, the pier and the promenade venues carry most of the leisure employment now.

Pay is modest. Seasonal and entry-level hospitality roles typically sit around the National Living Wage, which works out at roughly £23,000–£25,000 for full-time hours, with chefs, supervisors and duty managers generally in the £26,000–£32,000 range depending on the venue. Seafront work is a good first job and a reliable source of summer income, but building a career on it usually means moving into management at one of the larger operators.

Grimsby next door

The reason Cleethorpes is a more viable place to build a career than its size suggests is Grimsby. The two towns run into each other and share a council, and Grimsby’s job market is one of the most distinctive in the Humber and all of it is within easy commuting distance.

The first pillar is food. Grimsby is one of the world’s largest seafood-processing clusters, sometimes called Europe’s Food Town, and Young’s Seafood alone employs somewhere between roughly 1,700 and 3,000 people locally depending on how the count is drawn, supplying around 40% of the fish eaten in the UK. Production, packing, quality and technical roles in the processing plants are year-round, shift-based and recruited largely on the job, which makes them a natural next step after a summer on the seafront. Our food manufacturing sector guide covers what the work involves and how it pays.

The second pillar is offshore wind. Ørsted’s East Coast Hub at Grimsby’s Royal Dock has been described as the UK’s largest offshore wind operations and maintenance facility, supporting the company’s east coast wind farms including Hornsea 2 and Westermost Rough. Ørsted currently employs around 200 people at its Grimsby operations base and expects that to grow toward roughly 500, and its Hornsea 3 project is projected to generate up to 5,000 jobs during construction plus about 1,200 permanent roles at a new Grimsby operations hub. Across the Humber, offshore wind employment is projected to grow from around 1,700 jobs to roughly 10,500. A wind turbine technician apprenticeship is one of the best-paid routes available locally; see our offshore wind sector guide and our Ørsted employer profile.

Around those two sit the ABP-operated port and the 200-plus member firms of Humber Marine and Renewables, the marine engineering and offshore supply-chain network that grew up around Grimsby’s docks.

Health, care and training

Healthcare in North East Lincolnshire falls under NHS Humber Health Partnership, which combines Hull University Teaching Hospitals with Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust and employs around 20,000 people across five hospital sites. Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital in Grimsby is the local acute site. More than a fifth of the borough’s population is aged 65 or over, which keeps demand for care staff, both residential and domiciliary, consistently high in Cleethorpes itself; our healthcare sector guide covers entry routes.

TEC Partnership, headquartered at Grimsby Institute, is the main further education provider and offers apprenticeships from Level 2 to Level 7 across food, engineering, marine, hospitality and business, with University Centre Grimsby providing degree-level study without leaving the area.

Getting around

TransPennine Express runs an hourly service through Grimsby and Scunthorpe to Doncaster, Sheffield, Manchester Piccadilly and Liverpool, East Midlands Railway runs the Barton line to Barton-upon-Humber and services toward Lincoln and Nottingham, and local buses link the seafront with Grimsby town centre and the docks in a few minutes.

Where to go next

Our Grimsby location guide covers the neighbouring town’s employers in more depth, and our Grimsby apprenticeships guide is the place to start if you’re leaving education. If you’re currently in seasonal work and want something permanent, our guide to jobs with no experience in the Humber is a practical next read.