Software-Defined Networking Contract Job Trends in England

Software-Defined Networking
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in England requiring Software-Defined Networking skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 18 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 493 484 560
Rank change year-on-year -9 +76 +161
Contract jobs citing Software-Defined Networking 24 45 34
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.085% 0.14% 0.082%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 0.73% 1.16% 0.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 15 22 20
10th Percentile £440 £500 £409
25th Percentile £481 £506 £459
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £563 £605
Median % change year-on-year -2.22% -7.02% +0.83%
75th Percentile £588 £716 £735
90th Percentile £606 £730 £1,000
UK median daily rate £573 £535 £575
% change year-on-year +7.01% -6.96% -4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 4
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - -
Median hourly rate - - £69.62
75th Percentile - - £69.88
90th Percentile - - £70.34
UK median hourly rate - - £69.62
% change year-on-year - - +20.61%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
England

Software-Defined Networking falls under the Communications and Computer Networking category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring communications or computer networking skills in England.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 3,295 3,883 5,660
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 11.66% 12.16% 13.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,104 2,234 3,564
10th Percentile £216 £240 £220
25th Percentile £360 £384 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.50% - -1.96%
75th Percentile £588 £608 £613
90th Percentile £688 £688 £700
UK median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -
Number of hourly rates quoted 175 147 311
10th Percentile £15.50 £17.87 £17.30
25th Percentile £20.00 £26.25 £23.05
Median hourly rate £34.00 £57.25 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year -40.61% +1.35% +36.90%
75th Percentile £65.00 £67.50 £67.50
90th Percentile £75.00 £75.00 £76.25
UK median hourly rate £34.00 £48.56 £56.45
% change year-on-year -29.98% -13.97% +41.73%

Software-Defined Networking
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Software-Defined Networking relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in England.

Software-Defined Networking job vacancy trend in England

Software-Defined Networking
Daily Rate Trend in England

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Software-Defined Networking.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking
Daily Rate Histogram in England

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Software-Defined Networking in England over the 6 months to 18 October 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Software-Defined Networking in England

Software-Defined Networking
Hourly Rate Trend in England

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Software-Defined Networking.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in England citing Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking
Contract Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Software-Defined Networking within the England region over the 6 months to 18 October 2025. 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
London +16 10 £573 +7.01% 7
South East +4 4 £575 -17.86% 3
Midlands -18 4 - -
West Midlands -21 4 - -
North of England -32 3 £505 -15.83% 6
South West +16 2 £543 -
North West -14 2 £505 -15.83% 4
East of England - 2 £475 - 1
Yorkshire -25 1 - - 2
Software-Defined Networking
UK

Software-Defined Networking
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England 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 2 (8.33%) Confluence
2 1 (4.17%) OpenStack
Applications
1 1 (4.17%) Microsoft Office
Cloud Services
1 3 (12.50%) AWS
1 3 (12.50%) Azure
1 3 (12.50%) IaaS
2 2 (8.33%) Amazon S3
2 2 (8.33%) GCP
2 2 (8.33%) Microsoft 365
3 1 (4.17%) Amazon ECS
3 1 (4.17%) AWS Fargate
3 1 (4.17%) AWS Lambda
3 1 (4.17%) OpenShift
3 1 (4.17%) PaaS
3 1 (4.17%) Route 53
3 1 (4.17%) SaaS
3 1 (4.17%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 11 (45.83%) BGP
1 11 (45.83%) Firewall
2 7 (29.17%) DNS
2 7 (29.17%) Wireless
3 6 (25.00%) OSPF
4 5 (20.83%) Cisco ASA
4 5 (20.83%) Cisco Nexus
4 5 (20.83%) DHCP
5 4 (16.67%) BIG-IP
5 4 (16.67%) Ethernet VPN
5 4 (16.67%) VLAN
6 3 (12.50%) Cisco Firepower
6 3 (12.50%) LAN
6 3 (12.50%) Multicast
6 3 (12.50%) Network Security
7 2 (8.33%) HTTP
7 2 (8.33%) Internet
7 2 (8.33%) SSL
7 2 (8.33%) VPN
7 2 (8.33%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (4.17%) Amazon RDS
1 1 (4.17%) Redis
1 1 (4.17%) SQL Server
Development Applications
1 3 (12.50%) Git
1 3 (12.50%) GitLab
1 3 (12.50%) JIRA
1 3 (12.50%) Sonatype Nexus
2 2 (8.33%) Jenkins
3 1 (4.17%) Bitbucket
3 1 (4.17%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 10 (41.67%) Social Skills
2 5 (20.83%) Public Sector
3 3 (12.50%) Analytical Skills
3 3 (12.50%) Finance
3 3 (12.50%) Telecoms
4 2 (8.33%) Documentation Skills
4 2 (8.33%) Inclusion and Diversity
Job Titles
1 7 (29.17%) Network Engineer
2 5 (20.83%) Architect
3 4 (16.67%) Senior
4 3 (12.50%) Consultant
5 2 (8.33%) Cisco Engineer
5 2 (8.33%) Cisco Network Engineer
5 2 (8.33%) Lead
5 2 (8.33%) Network Consultant
5 2 (8.33%) Product Architect
5 2 (8.33%) Product Owner
5 2 (8.33%) Senior Consultant
5 2 (8.33%) Senior Network Consultant
6 1 (4.17%) Developer
6 1 (4.17%) Network Infrastructure Engineer
6 1 (4.17%) Senior Architect
6 1 (4.17%) Senior Cisco Network Engineer
6 1 (4.17%) Technical Architect
6 1 (4.17%) Virtualisation Specialist
6 1 (4.17%) VMware Architect
6 1 (4.17%) VMware Specialist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (4.17%) ASP.NET Web API
1 1 (4.17%) eBPF
1 1 (4.17%) Elastic Stack
1 1 (4.17%) LDAP
1 1 (4.17%) NETCONF
1 1 (4.17%) RabbitMQ
1 1 (4.17%) REST
1 1 (4.17%) RESTCONF
1 1 (4.17%) RESTful
1 1 (4.17%) WCF
1 1 (4.17%) YANG
Miscellaneous
1 9 (37.50%) Data Centre
2 4 (16.67%) Data Protection Act
3 2 (8.33%) Legacy Systems
3 2 (8.33%) Product Ownership
4 1 (4.17%) Cloud Native
4 1 (4.17%) Fat Client
4 1 (4.17%) Linux Command Line
4 1 (4.17%) PKI
4 1 (4.17%) Private Cloud
4 1 (4.17%) Thin Client
4 1 (4.17%) Web Conferencing
Operating Systems
1 3 (12.50%) Linux
2 2 (8.33%) Windows
2 2 (8.33%) Windows Server
3 1 (4.17%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 7 (29.17%) Agile
2 6 (25.00%) Infrastructure Automation
2 6 (25.00%) ITIL
3 5 (20.83%) Network Monitoring
4 4 (16.67%) Data Protection
4 4 (16.67%) Network Design
4 4 (16.67%) Task Automation
5 3 (12.50%) CI/CD
5 3 (12.50%) DevOps
5 3 (12.50%) Infrastructure as Code
5 3 (12.50%) Load Balancing
5 3 (12.50%) Network Architecture
5 3 (12.50%) Network Virtualisation
5 3 (12.50%) Problem-Solving
5 3 (12.50%) Process Improvement
6 2 (8.33%) Coaching
6 2 (8.33%) Containerisation
6 2 (8.33%) Product Management
6 2 (8.33%) Service Asset and Configuration Management
6 2 (8.33%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 9 (37.50%) Python
2 5 (20.83%) PowerShell
3 1 (4.17%) Bash
3 1 (4.17%) C
3 1 (4.17%) JavaScript
3 1 (4.17%) Perl
3 1 (4.17%) SQL
Qualifications
1 9 (37.50%) Cisco Certification
2 8 (33.33%) CCNP
3 7 (29.17%) Security Cleared
4 4 (16.67%) CCIE
4 4 (16.67%) Degree
4 4 (16.67%) SC Cleared
5 3 (12.50%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
6 2 (8.33%) CISSP
6 2 (8.33%) DV Cleared
6 2 (8.33%) VCAP
7 1 (4.17%) AWS Certification
7 1 (4.17%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
7 1 (4.17%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (4.17%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
7 1 (4.17%) CCIE Data Center
7 1 (4.17%) CCIE Routing and Switching
7 1 (4.17%) CCIE Wireless
7 1 (4.17%) Computer Science Degree
7 1 (4.17%) JNCIE
7 1 (4.17%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 1 (4.17%) NCSC
1 1 (4.17%) NIST
1 1 (4.17%) NIST 800
System Software
1 5 (20.83%) VMware Infrastructure
2 4 (16.67%) VMware NSX
3 3 (12.50%) Docker
4 2 (8.33%) Active Directory
4 2 (8.33%) Hyper-V
4 2 (8.33%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 9 (37.50%) Ansible
2 5 (20.83%) Terraform
3 3 (12.50%) Kubernetes
3 3 (12.50%) Nagios
3 3 (12.50%) vRealize
4 2 (8.33%) FortiGate
4 2 (8.33%) Puppet
4 2 (8.33%) vRealize Orchestrator
5 1 (4.17%) Dell DRAC
5 1 (4.17%) Failover Clustering
5 1 (4.17%) Grafana
5 1 (4.17%) Progress Chef
5 1 (4.17%) Prometheus
5 1 (4.17%) VxRail
Vendors
1 16 (66.67%) Cisco
2 6 (25.00%) F5
2 6 (25.00%) VMware
3 5 (20.83%) Arista
3 5 (20.83%) CheckPoint
4 4 (16.67%) Palo Alto
5 3 (12.50%) AlgoSec
5 3 (12.50%) Infoblox
5 3 (12.50%) SolarWinds
6 2 (8.33%) Aruba
6 2 (8.33%) Dell
6 2 (8.33%) HP
6 2 (8.33%) Juniper
6 2 (8.33%) Meraki
6 2 (8.33%) Microsoft
6 2 (8.33%) Salesforce
7 1 (4.17%) Atlassian
7 1 (4.17%) Red Hat
7 1 (4.17%) Veeam
7 1 (4.17%) Wind River