Thought Leadership Job Trends

Thought Leadership
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Thought Leadership skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 30 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 316 261 444
Rank change year-on-year -55 +183 -187
Permanent jobs citing Thought Leadership 623 573 448
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.61% 1.16% 0.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.83% 1.30% 0.63%
Number of salaries quoted 253 155 274
10th Percentile £45,000 £45,000 £41,250
25th Percentile £60,000 £57,500 £51,563
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £82,500 £75,000
Median % change year-on-year -3.03% +10.00% -7.03%
75th Percentile £106,750 £104,375 £97,500
90th Percentile £117,500 £118,250 £133,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £67,500 £77,500
% change year-on-year +3.70% -12.90% +10.71%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Thought Leadership falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 75,424 44,229 70,800
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.68% 89.64% 81.30%
Number of salaries quoted 51,991 25,065 47,390
10th Percentile £30,500 £28,750 £30,000
25th Percentile £41,250 £37,500 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% - -8.33%
75th Percentile £78,750 £76,250 £73,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +10.00% - -9.09%

Thought Leadership
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Thought Leadership relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Thought Leadership job vacancy trend in the UK

Thought Leadership
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Thought Leadership.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Thought Leadership

Thought Leadership
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Thought Leadership over the 6 months to 30 July 2026.

Salary histogram for Thought Leadership in the UK

Thought Leadership
Top 16 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Thought Leadership within the UK over the 6 months to 30 July 2026. 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England -58 571 £80,000 -0.93% 441
London -16 371 £95,000 +8.57% 341
UK excluding London -88 192 £70,000 +3.70% 132
Work from Home -19 142 £70,000 -17.65% 160
North of England -14 64 £95,000 +0.38% 35
East of England - 43 £60,100 - 6
North West +8 39 £95,000 +0.38% 26
Midlands -18 37 £80,000 +56.10% 14
South East -119 25 £37,500 -23.47% 42
West Midlands -25 20 £80,000 +56.10% 7
East Midlands -5 17 £50,000 - 7
Yorkshire -23 17 £76,840 +2.45% 6
South West -59 11 £59,750 -25.31% 19
North East -46 8 £100,000 +71.67% 3
Wales - 8 £55,000 - 4
Scotland +2 4 £110,000 +15.79% 7

Thought Leadership
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 16 (2.57%) Palantir Foundry
2 10 (1.61%) Microsoft Exchange
3 6 (0.96%) Apache Spark
4 5 (0.80%) CMS
5 3 (0.48%) Confluence
5 3 (0.48%) SAS
6 2 (0.32%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (0.32%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.32%) Umbraco
6 2 (0.32%) WordPress
7 1 (0.16%) Apache
7 1 (0.16%) ArcGIS
7 1 (0.16%) Drupal
7 1 (0.16%) IIS
7 1 (0.16%) nginx
Applications
1 8 (1.28%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 3 (0.48%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.48%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.16%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 1 (0.16%) Adobe XD
3 1 (0.16%) InVision
3 1 (0.16%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.16%) Sketch
3 1 (0.16%) Trello
Business Applications
1 25 (4.01%) SAP S/4HANA
2 6 (0.96%) Distributed Ledger
3 5 (0.80%) Dynamics CRM
3 5 (0.80%) SAP MDG
4 4 (0.64%) SAP MDG-F
5 3 (0.48%) SAP MDG-BP
5 3 (0.48%) Summit
6 2 (0.32%) Elite 3E
6 2 (0.32%) SAP CO
6 2 (0.32%) SAP FI
6 2 (0.32%) SAP FI/CO
7 1 (0.16%) Magento
7 1 (0.16%) NetSuite
7 1 (0.16%) SAP IBP
7 1 (0.16%) SAP MDG-M
7 1 (0.16%) SAP MDG-S
Cloud Services
1 164 (26.32%) AWS
2 92 (14.77%) Azure
3 66 (10.59%) SaaS
4 53 (8.51%) GCP
5 36 (5.78%) Cloud Computing
6 28 (4.49%) AWS CloudFormation
7 27 (4.33%) Snowflake
8 23 (3.69%) Serverless
9 15 (2.41%) Power Platform
10 14 (2.25%) Amazon Bedrock
10 14 (2.25%) GitHub
11 10 (1.61%) Azure AI
11 10 (1.61%) PaaS
12 8 (1.28%) Amazon EKS
13 7 (1.12%) Amazon ECS
13 7 (1.12%) Amazon S3
13 7 (1.12%) Azure DevOps
13 7 (1.12%) GitHub Actions
13 7 (1.12%) Microsoft 365
14 6 (0.96%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 18 (2.89%) Firewall
2 10 (1.61%) Internet
3 6 (0.96%) Intrusion Detection
3 6 (0.96%) Network Security
3 6 (0.96%) Wireless
4 5 (0.80%) Broadband
4 5 (0.80%) Cisco ISE
4 5 (0.80%) Cisco Wireless
4 5 (0.80%) LAN
4 5 (0.80%) SD-WAN
4 5 (0.80%) WAN
4 5 (0.80%) WebEx
4 5 (0.80%) WLAN
5 2 (0.32%) AMQP
5 2 (0.32%) Cisco IPT
5 2 (0.32%) MQTT
5 2 (0.32%) SSL
6 1 (0.16%) Bluetooth
6 1 (0.16%) SMS
6 1 (0.16%) ZigBee
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (4.98%) Data Warehouse
2 29 (4.65%) Data Lake
3 24 (3.85%) NoSQL
4 14 (2.25%) Power BI
5 9 (1.44%) Data Mining
6 7 (1.12%) Big Data
6 7 (1.12%) Tableau
7 6 (0.96%) Amazon QuickSight
7 6 (0.96%) SAP HANA
8 5 (0.80%) Metadata
9 4 (0.64%) BusinessObjects
9 4 (0.64%) Delta Lake
9 4 (0.64%) Hadoop
10 3 (0.48%) Amazon RDS
10 3 (0.48%) Geospatial Data
10 3 (0.48%) Semantic Layer
10 3 (0.48%) SQL Server Analysis Services
11 2 (0.32%) Amazon Redshift
11 2 (0.32%) SAP BW
11 2 (0.32%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 21 (3.37%) GitLab
2 20 (3.21%) Cucumber
3 8 (1.28%) MLflow
4 5 (0.80%) Git
4 5 (0.80%) Jenkins
4 5 (0.80%) Maven
5 4 (0.64%) Claude Code
6 3 (0.48%) JIRA
7 2 (0.32%) rollup.js
8 1 (0.16%) Ant
8 1 (0.16%) Apache Ivy
8 1 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 1 (0.16%) Axure RP
8 1 (0.16%) Balsamiq
8 1 (0.16%) Gatling
8 1 (0.16%) IBM UrbanCode
8 1 (0.16%) JMeter
8 1 (0.16%) mountebank
8 1 (0.16%) Vagrant
8 1 (0.16%) Vite
General
1 219 (35.15%) Finance
2 174 (27.93%) Social Skills
3 120 (19.26%) Marketing
4 114 (18.30%) Public Sector
5 90 (14.45%) Analytical Skills
6 64 (10.27%) Retail
7 61 (9.79%) Presentation Skills
8 49 (7.87%) Banking
9 45 (7.22%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 41 (6.58%) Influencing Skills
11 37 (5.94%) Legal
12 21 (3.37%) Brand Awareness
13 19 (3.05%) Financial Institution
13 19 (3.05%) Law
14 16 (2.57%) Telecoms
15 15 (2.41%) Organisational Skills
15 15 (2.41%) Public Speaking
16 14 (2.25%) Manufacturing
17 13 (2.09%) Aerospace
17 13 (2.09%) Military
Job Titles
1 136 (21.83%) Senior
2 104 (16.69%) Architect
3 76 (12.20%) Consultant
4 75 (12.04%) Lead
5 44 (7.06%) Sales Executive
6 42 (6.74%) Account Executive
6 42 (6.74%) Senior Manager
7 30 (4.82%) Solutions Architect
8 28 (4.49%) Senior Architect
9 26 (4.17%) Business Development Executive
10 24 (3.85%) Data Management Specialist
10 24 (3.85%) Product Manager
10 24 (3.85%) Product Specialist
10 24 (3.85%) Senior Sales Executive
11 23 (3.69%) Senior Consultant
12 22 (3.53%) Lead Architect
13 21 (3.37%) Account Manager
13 21 (3.37%) Java Engineer
13 21 (3.37%) Senior Product Manager
14 20 (3.21%) Senior Account Executive
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 31 (4.98%) Kafka
2 24 (3.85%) Spring
2 24 (3.85%) Spring Boot
3 10 (1.61%) LangGraph
4 9 (1.44%) LangChain
5 6 (0.96%) FastAPI
5 6 (0.96%) XML
6 5 (0.80%) CrewAI
6 5 (0.80%) Model Context Protocol
7 4 (0.64%) CSS
7 4 (0.64%) HTML
7 4 (0.64%) PySpark
7 4 (0.64%) PyTorch
7 4 (0.64%) RabbitMQ
7 4 (0.64%) React
7 4 (0.64%) REST
7 4 (0.64%) SOAP
7 4 (0.64%) TensorFlow
7 4 (0.64%) VML
8 3 (0.48%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 65 (10.43%) Cloud Native
2 54 (8.67%) Onboarding
3 46 (7.38%) Enterprise Software
4 37 (5.94%) Blog
5 26 (4.17%) AI Agents
5 26 (4.17%) e-Learning
6 24 (3.85%) Distributed Systems
7 21 (3.37%) Public Cloud
8 20 (3.21%) Product Ownership
9 18 (2.89%) Social Media
10 16 (2.57%) Self-Motivation
10 16 (2.57%) Web Conferencing
11 15 (2.41%) Management Information System
12 14 (2.25%) NHS
13 12 (1.93%) Legacy Applications
14 11 (1.77%) Greenfield Project
15 10 (1.61%) Enterprise Cloud
15 10 (1.61%) Life Science
16 9 (1.44%) Data Fabric
16 9 (1.44%) Podcast
Operating Systems
1 7 (1.12%) Linux
2 6 (0.96%) Windows
3 2 (0.32%) Unix
3 2 (0.32%) Windows Server
4 1 (0.16%) Solaris
Processes & Methodologies
1 221 (35.47%) AI
2 173 (27.77%) Mentoring
3 170 (27.29%) Business Development
4 157 (25.20%) Decision-Making
5 154 (24.72%) Roadmaps
6 148 (23.76%) Analytics
7 98 (15.73%) Agile
8 87 (13.96%) Stakeholder Management
9 78 (12.52%) Continuous Improvement
9 78 (12.52%) Problem-Solving
10 76 (12.20%) B2B
11 73 (11.72%) DevOps
12 70 (11.24%) CI/CD
13 68 (10.91%) Machine Learning
14 67 (10.75%) Strategic Thinking
15 65 (10.43%) Coaching
16 64 (10.27%) Cybersecurity
17 60 (9.63%) Risk Management
18 59 (9.47%) Infrastructure as Code
19 56 (8.99%) Workshop Facilitation
Programming Languages
1 56 (8.99%) Python
2 43 (6.90%) Java
3 42 (6.74%) SQL
4 9 (1.44%) R
5 5 (0.80%) Bash
5 5 (0.80%) Go
5 5 (0.80%) PowerShell
6 3 (0.48%) C#
6 3 (0.48%) JavaScript
6 3 (0.48%) Kotlin
7 2 (0.32%) ABAP
7 2 (0.32%) Bicep
8 1 (0.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 1 (0.16%) PHP
8 1 (0.16%) Scala
8 1 (0.16%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 153 (24.56%) Degree
2 87 (13.96%) Security Cleared
3 55 (8.83%) SC Cleared
4 36 (5.78%) AWS Certification
5 23 (3.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 22 (3.53%) CISSP
7 20 (3.21%) CISM
7 20 (3.21%) Master's Degree
8 18 (2.89%) Computer Science Degree
9 14 (2.25%) Azure Certification
9 14 (2.25%) DV Cleared
10 13 (2.09%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
11 12 (1.93%) CRISC
12 11 (1.77%) BPSS Clearance
12 11 (1.77%) DBS Check
13 10 (1.61%) Cisco Certification
14 9 (1.44%) MBA
15 8 (1.28%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 8 (1.28%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 6 (0.96%) GSEC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 31 (4.98%) GRC
2 28 (4.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 23 (3.69%) NIST
4 20 (3.21%) GDPR
5 15 (2.41%) Accessibility
6 14 (2.25%) Data Quality
7 13 (2.09%) JSP 440
8 11 (1.77%) PCI DSS
8 11 (1.77%) SLA
9 10 (1.61%) EU AI Act
10 9 (1.44%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 9 (1.44%) QA
11 7 (1.12%) Basel III
12 6 (0.96%) Government Security Classifications
13 5 (0.80%) Cyber Essentials
14 4 (0.64%) PMO
15 3 (0.48%) IFRS
15 3 (0.48%) NCSC
15 3 (0.48%) WCAG
16 2 (0.32%) GAAP
System Software
1 21 (3.37%) Docker
2 6 (0.96%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.48%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 1 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 26 (4.17%) Kubernetes
2 18 (2.89%) Terraform
3 12 (1.93%) Ansible
4 6 (0.96%) Puppet
5 4 (0.64%) Argo
5 4 (0.64%) Progress Chef
6 2 (0.32%) Salt
7 1 (0.16%) Amdocs OSS
7 1 (0.16%) Consul
7 1 (0.16%) EMC NetWorker
7 1 (0.16%) Grafana
7 1 (0.16%) Packer
7 1 (0.16%) RSA Archer
Vendors
1 82 (13.16%) Dell
2 58 (9.31%) Microsoft
3 37 (5.94%) SAP
4 34 (5.46%) Databricks
5 27 (4.33%) Salesforce
6 25 (4.01%) Informatica
6 25 (4.01%) Teradata
7 24 (3.85%) Denodo
8 22 (3.53%) Google
9 20 (3.21%) ServiceNow
10 17 (2.73%) Foundry
11 16 (2.57%) Palantir
12 13 (2.09%) HubSpot
13 8 (1.28%) Cisco
14 7 (1.12%) Oracle
15 6 (0.96%) Cognizant
15 6 (0.96%) OpenAI
15 6 (0.96%) Workday
16 5 (0.80%) Ariba
16 5 (0.80%) Juniper