Nobody in the UK needs to be told that 2009 has been a difficult year in the jobs market, and not least in the building industry. Over 30s may recall difficult times in the 1980s when building services jobs were hard to come by.

Some skilled labourers in the industry were forced to look overseas for vacancies as work dried up and unemployment reached three million. Reminders of this can be seen frequently on TV in reruns of the 1983 hit comedy drama Auf Wiedersehen Pet, where British workers found gainful employment in Germany.

These British workers kept getting in to trouble, but fortunately the antics of the boys from that wonderful TV show haven?t detracted overseas employers from offering building services jobs to British workers. It may surprise some that even in the current climate opportunities arise in countries such as France, as reported on french-property.com earlier in the year.

It seems that increasingly expats living in France are far happier to employ the services of experienced British professionals than to use local workers. This is in part due to home owners overseas preferring the comfort of dealing with people in their native tongue.

However, many stories of British home owners and indeed other foreign nationals being overcharged by French builders have become more commonplace in recent times. The French workers? loss could lead to more chance of British firms being awarded projects overseas, and as a result perhaps more vacancies arising for British workers.