Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
UK

The following table provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies with a requirement for OCR skills. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that have cited OCR over the 6 months to 23 April 2024 with a comparison to the same period in the previous 2 years.

6 months to
23 Apr 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 561 675 847
Rank change year-on-year +114 +172 -170
Contract jobs citing OCR 30 32 15
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.069% 0.053% 0.017%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.080% 0.059% 0.019%
Number of daily rates quoted 28 20 11
10th Percentile £400 £406 £413
25th Percentile £405 £427 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £455 £470 £495
Median % change year-on-year -3.09% -5.15% -10.00%
75th Percentile £489 £525 £556
90th Percentile £534 £621 £575
UK excluding London median daily rate £460 £450 £450
% change year-on-year +2.22% - +2.27%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

OCR is in the Processes and Methodologies category. The following table is for comparison with the above and provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 37,683 54,210 80,866
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.32% 89.89% 90.59%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,351 37,527 56,743
10th Percentile £300 £325 £340
25th Percentile £413 £438 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +4.76% +8.36%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £638
90th Percentile £750 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £475
% change year-on-year - +5.26% +9.83%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,427 1,790 1,945
10th Percentile £12.75 £11.00 £12.50
25th Percentile £16.00 £16.64 £15.25
Median hourly rate £35.00 £37.50 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.67% +50.00% -
75th Percentile £58.75 £65.00 £49.25
90th Percentile £72.07 £75.00 £63.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.50 £37.30 £20.00
% change year-on-year -4.83% +86.50% -8.17%

OCR
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing OCR as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for OCR in the UK

OCR
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing OCR.

Daily rate trend for OCR in the UK

OCR
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing OCR over the 6 months to 23 April 2024.

Daily rate histogram for OCR in the UK

OCR
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing OCR.

Hourly rate trend for OCR in the UK

OCR
Top 11 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing OCR within the UK over the 6 months to 23 April 2024. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
UK excluding London +68 23 £460 +2.22% 2
England +120 21 £450 -18.18% 6
Work from Home +114 10 £463 +0.54% 2
South East +24 9 £400 -3.03% 2
East of England - 6 £495 -
Scotland +33 5 £463 -3.44%
London +94 3 £650 +8.33% 4
North West - 2 - -
North of England - 2 - -
West Midlands - 1 £450 -
Midlands - 1 £450 -

OCR
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Business Applications
1 10 (33.33%) OpenText VIM for SAP
1 10 (33.33%) SAP FI-AP
Cloud Services
1 5 (16.67%) Amazon S3
1 5 (16.67%) AWS
1 5 (16.67%) AWS CloudFormation
1 5 (16.67%) AWS Lambda
1 5 (16.67%) Serverless
2 3 (10.00%) Amazon SageMaker
2 3 (10.00%) OpenShift
3 2 (6.67%) Rekognition
3 2 (6.67%) Textract
4 1 (3.33%) AWS CodePipeline
4 1 (3.33%) Dynamics 365
4 1 (3.33%) Power Automate
4 1 (3.33%) Power Platform
Database & Business Intelligence
1 5 (16.67%) PostgreSQL
2 4 (13.33%) Amazon Aurora
3 1 (3.33%) Amazon RDS
3 1 (3.33%) Data Warehouse
3 1 (3.33%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 1 (3.33%) GitLab
General
1 9 (30.00%) Public Sector
2 8 (26.67%) Manufacturing
3 3 (10.00%) Analytical Skills
4 1 (3.33%) Billing
4 1 (3.33%) Finance
4 1 (3.33%) Legal
4 1 (3.33%) Publishing
4 1 (3.33%) Social Skills
Job Titles
1 21 (70.00%) Developer
2 6 (20.00%) Architect
2 6 (20.00%) C++ Developer
2 6 (20.00%) Software Developer
3 2 (6.67%) Analyst
3 2 (6.67%) Automation Developer
3 2 (6.67%) Automation Engineer
3 2 (6.67%) Service Analyst
3 2 (6.67%) Service Desk Analyst
4 1 (3.33%) C++ Software Developer
4 1 (3.33%) Data Engineer
4 1 (3.33%) Junior
4 1 (3.33%) Junior Analyst
4 1 (3.33%) Lead
4 1 (3.33%) Lead Developer
4 1 (3.33%) Machine Learning Engineer
4 1 (3.33%) Power Platform Developer
4 1 (3.33%) Python Engineer
4 1 (3.33%) SAP Developer
4 1 (3.33%) Software Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (33.33%) EDI
1 10 (33.33%) IDoc
2 8 (26.67%) SAP Business Workflow
3 5 (16.67%) AWS CDK
4 1 (3.33%) NgRx
4 1 (3.33%) PostGIS
4 1 (3.33%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 9 (30.00%) CCTV
2 1 (3.33%) Product Ownership
2 1 (3.33%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 9 (30.00%) Linux
1 9 (30.00%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 15 (50.00%) Agile
2 11 (36.67%) Analytics
3 10 (33.33%) Accounts Payable
3 10 (33.33%) Invoice Processing
3 10 (33.33%) Root Cause Analysis
3 10 (33.33%) Software Engineering
3 10 (33.33%) Workflow
4 9 (30.00%) Refactoring
4 9 (30.00%) Stakeholder Management
5 7 (23.33%) Artificial Intelligence
6 6 (20.00%) Machine Learning
7 5 (16.67%) Kanban
7 5 (16.67%) Natural Language Processing
7 5 (16.67%) Scrum
8 4 (13.33%) Infrastructure as Code
8 4 (13.33%) Product Management
8 4 (13.33%) Service Design
8 4 (13.33%) User Experience
9 3 (10.00%) Code Quality
9 3 (10.00%) Community of Practice
Programming Languages
1 10 (33.33%) ABAP
2 9 (30.00%) C#
2 9 (30.00%) C++
3 6 (20.00%) Python
4 4 (13.33%) TypeScript
5 2 (6.67%) Java
6 1 (3.33%) SQL
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 8 (26.67%) ISO 9001
1 8 (26.67%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (10.00%) Accessibility
3 2 (6.67%) QA
System Software
1 3 (10.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 5 (16.67%) Grafana
2 2 (6.67%) Kubernetes
Vendors
1 10 (33.33%) OpenText
1 10 (33.33%) SAP
2 2 (6.67%) Microsoft