Step into the future as $500bn NEOM megacity is HIRING for thousands of jobs – see what YOU could do
FROM prison officers to engineers, Saudi Arabia’s futuristic megacity is hiring for thousands of jobs.
Neom will be an ultra-modern metropolis in complete contrast to the other very conservative parts of the desert kingdom.
The vast development will include several mega projects – including The Line, Sindalah, and Oxagon.
And Saudi wants to attract “the brightest and the best” professionals to the city and create a major commercial hub to rival Dubai in the UAE and Doha in Qatar.
Around 20 per cent of the $500billion project has now been finished.
Designed to house a whopping nine million people, the megacity has advertised thousands of jobs.
The roles range from technicians and engineers to logistics specialists and architects.
The official career portal is also listing vacancies for a prison warden, a farm manager, and a port security manager.
Graphic designers, bankers and language specialists are also being sought.
The city is selling itself to applicants as “the land of the future where the greatest minds and the best talent are empowered to embody pioneering ideas and exceed boundaries in a world inspired by imagination”.
According to planning documents, robot maids will clean the homes of these highly paid foreign workers – meaning they won’t have to worry about household chores.
Backed by Saudi’s $500 billion Private Investment Fund, the group which purchased Newcastle United, the plans for Neom are so ambitious that some of the technology doesn’t even exist yet.
The city will be located on the border with Jordan and Egypt and will start welcoming residents and businesses by 2025.
It is being “built from scratch”, powered by solar and wind and will be 17 times the size of London.
According to Neom’s chairman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the urban area will be “be drone-friendly and a centre for the development of robotics”.
Planning documents show the city will have flying taxis – a vehicle depicted in science fiction films such as Blade Runner and Back to the Future II.
Cloud seeding will also be used to make rain clouds in the incredibly dry country which is the size of Western Europe.
The process involves dumping substances such as dry ice, using planes or drones, into clouds to create rainfall.
Some of the other bizarre proposals for the city include “dinosaur robots” in a Jurassic Park-style attraction and “robot martial arts” where machines will fight each other for entertainment.
The kingdom also wants to create a giant artificial moon which will light up each night and serve as a major landmark.
Neom is part of Salman’s Vision 2030 plan to diversify Saudi’s oil-dependent economy.
Part of the project is a metropolis that will house five million people in a 110 mile sideways skyscraper – known as The Line.
The Line will consist of two 1,600 feet tall buildings that run parallel to each other in the Saudi desert.
Work on the project – dubbed an Earth Scraper – began in October last year – and drone footage shows the site is already a hive of activity.
It will be so long that engineers will need struts to take the Earth’s curvature into account and and it will have its own high-speed rail line and marina.
The gargantuan complex is expected to run from the Gulf of Aqaba in the country’s west, through a mountain range and into a desert “aerotropolis”.
The slick structure boasts an end-to-end travel time of about 20 minutes and is to be powered off renewable energy.
Residents will need to have a subscription to access three meals a day.
The Line will be clad in mirrored glass and will be about the size of the US state Massachusetts and taller than the Empire State Building.
Neom also includes a remarkable eight-sided floating city.
Oxagon would be arranged around water-filled squares linked by canals, and contain a cruise terminal and oceanographic research centre.
It would be in the southwestern area of Neom, with half of it floating on the Red Sea, which is 500m deep on average.
With its strategic location close to the Suez Canal, it is expected to be a breathtaking new “logistics hub” for Saudi Arabia.
Its designers aim to have completed it by 2030 and claim that several of its main components will be in place by 2025.
A large part of the floating city will be given over to industry, but there will be residential settlements.