Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil, EngD, Doctorate)
UK

The following table provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies with a requirement for PhD qualifications. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered over the 6 months to 27 April 2024 with a comparison to the same period in the previous 2 years.

6 months to
27 Apr 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 514 575 701
Rank change year-on-year +61 +126 -158
Contract jobs citing PhD 84 144 148
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.19% 0.24% 0.17%
As % of the Qualifications category 0.63% 0.88% 0.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 48 84 76
10th Percentile £375 £229 £425
25th Percentile £504 £579 £525
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £600 £795 £600
Median % change year-on-year -24.53% +32.50% +4.35%
75th Percentile £738 £950 £750
90th Percentile £808 £1,300 £813
UK excluding London median daily rate £600 £557 £590
% change year-on-year +7.67% -5.55% +24.21%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 1 8
10th Percentile - - £18.50
25th Percentile - - £19.56
Median hourly rate £65.00 £20.47 £49.50
Median % change year-on-year +217.54% -58.65% +0.25%
75th Percentile - - £53.50
90th Percentile £73.25 - £66.61
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £20.47 £19.91
% change year-on-year +217.54% +2.81% -46.01%

All Academic and Professional Certifications
UK

PhD is in the Academic Qualifications and Professional Certifications category. The following table is for comparison with the above and provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies with a requirement for academic qualifications or professional certifications.

Contract vacancies requiring academic qualifications or professional certifications 13,270 16,337 19,076
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 30.65% 27.32% 21.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 8,165 10,899 12,575
10th Percentile £300 £325 £325
25th Percentile £425 £450 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £535 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year -2.73% +4.76% +8.25%
75th Percentile £650 £650 £625
90th Percentile £738 £743 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £530 £530 £500
% change year-on-year - +6.00% +11.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,067 858 776
10th Percentile £13.86 £15.25 £13.46
25th Percentile £17.80 £20.06 £19.33
Median hourly rate £40.00 £54.00 £41.50
Median % change year-on-year -25.93% +30.12% +5.06%
75th Percentile £61.60 £68.25 £56.31
90th Percentile £75.25 £80.00 £66.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £40.28 £50.00 £31.89
% change year-on-year -19.45% +56.79% -14.39%

PhD
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for PhD in the UK

PhD
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for PhD in the UK

PhD
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing PhD over the 6 months to 27 April 2024.

Daily rate histogram for PhD in the UK

PhD
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

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

Hourly rate trend for PhD in the UK

PhD
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 PhD within the UK over the 6 months to 27 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
England +88 81 £600 -27.27% 396
London +55 44 £600 -33.33% 181
Work from Home +126 37 £613 +5.79% 186
UK excluding London +69 33 £600 +7.67% 228
East of England +33 19 £800 - 64
South East +19 8 £625 +165.96% 70
West Midlands +32 3 £590 -12.59% 15
Midlands +25 3 £590 -12.59% 27
North West - 2 £550 - 27
North of England - 2 £550 - 35
South West +14 1 £750 +29.53% 19

PhD
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:

Application Platforms
1 3 (3.57%) Apache Spark
2 1 (1.19%) SAS
Applications
1 1 (1.19%) Chatbot
1 1 (1.19%) SPSS
Business Applications
1 2 (2.38%) SAP MDG
2 1 (1.19%) Endur
Cloud Services
1 7 (8.33%) Azure
2 6 (7.14%) AWS
3 2 (2.38%) Azure Machine Learning
3 2 (2.38%) GCP
3 2 (2.38%) Vertex AI
4 1 (1.19%) dbt
4 1 (1.19%) IBM Watson
4 1 (1.19%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 4 (4.76%) Wireless
2 2 (2.38%) SAN
3 1 (1.19%) Internet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (2.38%) Data Mining
2 1 (1.19%) Big Data
2 1 (1.19%) Data Lake
2 1 (1.19%) Data Warehouse
2 1 (1.19%) Elasticsearch
2 1 (1.19%) KDB
2 1 (1.19%) Metadata
2 1 (1.19%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 7 (8.33%) GCC
1 7 (8.33%) Git
2 4 (4.76%) JIRA
2 4 (4.76%) Subversion
General
1 29 (34.52%) Finance
2 18 (21.43%) Social Skills
3 10 (11.90%) Analytical Skills
4 8 (9.52%) Front Office
4 8 (9.52%) Inclusion and Diversity
4 8 (9.52%) Marketing
5 6 (7.14%) Pharmaceutical
6 5 (5.95%) Telecoms
7 4 (4.76%) Aerospace
8 3 (3.57%) Advertising
8 3 (3.57%) Banking
8 3 (3.57%) Financial Institution
8 3 (3.57%) Presentation Skills
8 3 (3.57%) Publishing
8 3 (3.57%) Retail
9 2 (2.38%) Back Office
10 1 (1.19%) Electronics
10 1 (1.19%) Manufacturing
10 1 (1.19%) Multimedia
10 1 (1.19%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 16 (19.05%) Architect
2 13 (15.48%) Software Engineer
3 12 (14.29%) Developer
4 10 (11.90%) Software Architect
5 9 (10.71%) Data Scientist
6 8 (9.52%) Senior
7 7 (8.33%) Compiler Engineer
7 7 (8.33%) Java Developer
7 7 (8.33%) Machine Learning Engineer
8 5 (5.95%) Consultant
8 5 (5.95%) Senior Architect
9 4 (4.76%) Econometrician
9 4 (4.76%) Embedded Engineer
9 4 (4.76%) Embedded Software Engineer
10 3 (3.57%) Quantitative Consultant
10 3 (3.57%) Quantitative Risk Consultant
10 3 (3.57%) Risk Consultant
10 3 (3.57%) Senior Solutions Architect
10 3 (3.57%) Solutions Architect
11 2 (2.38%) VMware Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (14.29%) DirectX
1 12 (14.29%) OpenGL
1 12 (14.29%) OpenGL ES
1 12 (14.29%) Vulkan
2 11 (13.10%) PyTorch
3 10 (11.90%) TensorFlow
4 7 (8.33%) LLVM
5 5 (5.95%) Pandas
5 5 (5.95%) scikit-learn
6 4 (4.76%) NumPy
7 2 (2.38%) Swagger
8 1 (1.19%) Dask
8 1 (1.19%) Elastic Stack
8 1 (1.19%) Hugging Face
8 1 (1.19%) JSON
8 1 (1.19%) Keras
8 1 (1.19%) Lucene
8 1 (1.19%) NLTK
8 1 (1.19%) PySpark
8 1 (1.19%) SpaCy
Miscellaneous
1 14 (16.67%) Algorithms
2 10 (11.90%) 3D Graphics
2 10 (11.90%) Ray Tracing
3 4 (4.76%) Device Driver
4 3 (3.57%) Derivative
4 3 (3.57%) Management Information System
5 2 (2.38%) Blockchain
5 2 (2.38%) Credit Risk
5 2 (2.38%) Data Centre
5 2 (2.38%) Multi-touch
5 2 (2.38%) Photography
5 2 (2.38%) Tandem
6 1 (1.19%) Data Structures
6 1 (1.19%) Distributed Systems
6 1 (1.19%) Equities
6 1 (1.19%) FMCG
6 1 (1.19%) Greenfield Project
6 1 (1.19%) Reference Data
6 1 (1.19%) Self-Motivation
6 1 (1.19%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 4 (4.76%) Linux
2 3 (3.57%) Android
3 2 (2.38%) Windows
4 1 (1.19%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 49 (58.33%) Computer Science
2 30 (35.71%) Machine Learning
2 30 (35.71%) Problem-Solving
3 23 (27.38%) Artificial Intelligence
4 20 (23.81%) Software Engineering
5 18 (21.43%) Statistics
6 16 (19.05%) Data Science
7 15 (17.86%) Collaborative Culture
7 15 (17.86%) Mathematics
8 14 (16.67%) Data Governance
8 14 (16.67%) Decision-Making
9 11 (13.10%) Data Lineage
9 11 (13.10%) Validation
10 10 (11.90%) Agile
10 10 (11.90%) Open Source
10 10 (11.90%) Software Architecture
11 9 (10.71%) Analytics
12 8 (9.52%) Economics
13 7 (8.33%) Deep Learning
13 7 (8.33%) Performance Analysis
Programming Languages
1 40 (47.62%) Python
2 31 (36.90%) C++
3 23 (27.38%) C
4 20 (23.81%) SQL
5 16 (19.05%) Java
6 10 (11.90%) R
7 7 (8.33%) Shell Script
8 6 (7.14%) C#
8 6 (7.14%) MATLAB
9 4 (4.76%) Assembly Language
10 3 (3.57%) Scala
Qualifications
1 77 (91.67%) Degree
2 67 (79.76%) Master's Degree
3 16 (19.05%) Computer Science Degree
4 5 (5.95%) Security Cleared
5 4 (4.76%) Numerate Degree
5 4 (4.76%) SC Cleared
6 3 (3.57%) MBA
7 1 (1.19%) DV Cleared
7 1 (1.19%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 4 (4.76%) Data Quality
1 4 (4.76%) Dodd-Frank
1 4 (4.76%) JTAG
1 4 (4.76%) MiFID
2 3 (3.57%) GDPR
3 2 (2.38%) PCI DSS
4 1 (1.19%) PMO
System Software
1 4 (4.76%) Embedded Firmware
1 4 (4.76%) Firmware
2 2 (2.38%) VMware Infrastructure
3 1 (1.19%) Docker
Vendors
1 3 (3.57%) SAP
2 2 (2.38%) Databricks
2 2 (2.38%) VMware
3 1 (1.19%) Google
3 1 (1.19%) IBM
3 1 (1.19%) OpenLink
3 1 (1.19%) Oracle