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 13 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
13 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 523 440 537
Rank change year-on-year -83 +97 +151
Contract jobs citing Software-Defined Networking 23 35 28
As % of all contract jobs in England 0.073% 0.13% 0.077%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 0.70% 1.03% 0.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 14 17 12
10th Percentile £533 £504 £527
25th Percentile - £506 £547
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £706
Median % change year-on-year - -22.12% +20.21%
75th Percentile £588 £725 £1,000
90th Percentile £607 £745 -
UK median daily rate £550 £550 £706
% change year-on-year - -22.12% +15.31%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 0 4
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - -
Median hourly rate £74.26 - £69.62
75th Percentile - - £69.88
90th Percentile - - £70.34
UK median hourly rate £74.26 - £69.62
% change year-on-year - - +21.44%

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 3,302 3,400 5,095
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in England 10.54% 12.79% 14.01%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,129 1,978 3,165
10th Percentile £204 £220 £206
25th Percentile £356 £375 £356
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -1.60% - -2.44%
75th Percentile £588 £607 £600
90th Percentile £688 £688 £700
UK median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - -2.44%
Number of hourly rates quoted 158 98 313
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.99 £18.93
25th Percentile £19.25 £20.30 £24.00
Median hourly rate £34.50 £35.00 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year -1.43% -38.04% +125.96%
75th Percentile £65.00 £62.25 £65.98
90th Percentile £74.48 £72.00 £75.59
UK median hourly rate £34.50 £32.50 £56.49
% change year-on-year +6.15% -42.47% +125.96%

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 13 January 2026.

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 13 January 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
North of England -52 9 £550 - 4
North West -20 8 £550 - 1
London -39 6 £605 -8.02% 3
South East -19 3 £575 -17.86% 2
North East - 3 £550 -
East of England -16 2 £475 -12.04%
West Midlands -40 2 - -
Midlands -49 2 - -
South West -21 1 £550 +4.76% 2
Yorkshire -44 1 - - 3
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 (8.70%) Confluence
2 1 (4.35%) JBoss
2 1 (4.35%) WebSphere
Applications
1 1 (4.35%) Microsoft Office
Cloud Services
1 2 (8.70%) Amazon S3
1 2 (8.70%) AWS
1 2 (8.70%) Azure
1 2 (8.70%) GCP
1 2 (8.70%) IaaS
2 1 (4.35%) Amazon ECS
2 1 (4.35%) AWS Fargate
2 1 (4.35%) AWS Lambda
2 1 (4.35%) Azure ExpressRoute
2 1 (4.35%) Route 53
2 1 (4.35%) Serverless
2 1 (4.35%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 14 (60.87%) Firewall
2 13 (56.52%) BGP
3 11 (47.83%) VLAN
4 5 (21.74%) Network Security
5 3 (13.04%) LAN
5 3 (13.04%) Wireless
6 2 (8.70%) DNS
6 2 (8.70%) OSPF
6 2 (8.70%) SD-WAN
6 2 (8.70%) VPN
6 2 (8.70%) VSAN
6 2 (8.70%) VXLAN
6 2 (8.70%) WAN
6 2 (8.70%) WLAN
7 1 (4.35%) 5G
7 1 (4.35%) Cisco ISE
7 1 (4.35%) EIGRP
7 1 (4.35%) Ethernet VPN
7 1 (4.35%) NaaS
7 1 (4.35%) NetScaler
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (8.70%) SQL Server
2 1 (4.35%) Amazon RDS
2 1 (4.35%) PostgreSQL
2 1 (4.35%) Redis
Development Applications
1 3 (13.04%) Git
1 3 (13.04%) GitLab
2 2 (8.70%) Jenkins
2 2 (8.70%) JIRA
3 1 (4.35%) Bitbucket
3 1 (4.35%) Jaeger
3 1 (4.35%) Octopus Deploy
General
1 11 (47.83%) Analytical Skills
2 10 (43.48%) Social Skills
3 3 (13.04%) Documentation Skills
3 3 (13.04%) Public Sector
4 2 (8.70%) Legal
5 1 (4.35%) Banking
5 1 (4.35%) Games
5 1 (4.35%) Influencing Skills
5 1 (4.35%) Investment Banking
5 1 (4.35%) Presentation Skills
5 1 (4.35%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 6 (26.09%) Platform Engineer
2 5 (21.74%) Architect
3 4 (17.39%) Network Engineer
4 3 (13.04%) Software Engineer
5 2 (8.70%) Network Architect
6 1 (4.35%) Administrator
6 1 (4.35%) Cisco Administrator
6 1 (4.35%) Consultant
6 1 (4.35%) Data Engineer
6 1 (4.35%) Data Network Engineer
6 1 (4.35%) Developer
6 1 (4.35%) DevOps Engineer
6 1 (4.35%) Monitoring Engineer
6 1 (4.35%) Network Monitoring Engineer
6 1 (4.35%) SC Cleared Network Engineer
6 1 (4.35%) Solutions Architect
6 1 (4.35%) Technical Architect
6 1 (4.35%) Virtualisation Specialist
6 1 (4.35%) VMware Architect
6 1 (4.35%) VMware Specialist
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (4.35%) ASP.NET Web API
1 1 (4.35%) Elastic Stack
1 1 (4.35%) LDAP
1 1 (4.35%) Loki
1 1 (4.35%) NETCONF
1 1 (4.35%) OpenTelemetry
1 1 (4.35%) RabbitMQ
1 1 (4.35%) REST
1 1 (4.35%) RESTCONF
1 1 (4.35%) RESTful
1 1 (4.35%) WCF
1 1 (4.35%) YANG
Miscellaneous
1 10 (43.48%) Data Centre
2 8 (34.78%) Product Ownership
3 3 (13.04%) Analytical Mindset
3 3 (13.04%) Data Protection Act
4 2 (8.70%) Cloud Native
5 1 (4.35%) Fat Client
5 1 (4.35%) Linux Command Line
5 1 (4.35%) Media Streaming
5 1 (4.35%) Online Games
5 1 (4.35%) Operational Technology
5 1 (4.35%) PKI
5 1 (4.35%) Private Cloud
5 1 (4.35%) Thin Client
5 1 (4.35%) Web Conferencing
Operating Systems
1 8 (34.78%) Linux
1 8 (34.78%) Windows
1 8 (34.78%) Windows Server
2 6 (26.09%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 1 (4.35%) Ubuntu
Processes & Methodologies
1 10 (43.48%) Containerisation
1 10 (43.48%) Problem-Solving
2 9 (39.13%) Cybersecurity
3 8 (34.78%) Continuous Improvement
3 8 (34.78%) ITSM
4 7 (30.43%) Change Control
4 7 (30.43%) CI/CD
4 7 (30.43%) High Availability
4 7 (30.43%) Platform Engineering
5 6 (26.09%) Computer Science
5 6 (26.09%) Knowledge Management
5 6 (26.09%) Stakeholder Engagement
6 5 (21.74%) Infrastructure Automation
6 5 (21.74%) Service Management
6 5 (21.74%) Virtual Infrastructure
7 4 (17.39%) Agile
7 4 (17.39%) Data Protection
7 4 (17.39%) Network Design
7 4 (17.39%) Software Engineering
8 3 (13.04%) Service Delivery
Programming Languages
1 15 (65.22%) Python
2 12 (52.17%) PowerShell
3 9 (39.13%) Bash
4 6 (26.09%) Perl
5 1 (4.35%) Go
5 1 (4.35%) Java
5 1 (4.35%) JavaScript
5 1 (4.35%) SQL
Qualifications
1 13 (56.52%) Security Cleared
2 10 (43.48%) SC Cleared
3 9 (39.13%) CCNP
3 9 (39.13%) Cisco Certification
4 7 (30.43%) Degree
5 4 (17.39%) CCDP
5 4 (17.39%) CCIE
5 4 (17.39%) CCNA
6 3 (13.04%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
7 2 (8.70%) AWS Certification
7 2 (8.70%) CISSP
7 2 (8.70%) DV Cleared
7 2 (8.70%) VCAP
8 1 (4.35%) (ISC)2 CCSP
8 1 (4.35%) CCIE Routing and Switching
8 1 (4.35%) CCIE Security
8 1 (4.35%) CCIE Wireless
8 1 (4.35%) CCSM
8 1 (4.35%) Computer Science Degree
8 1 (4.35%) Master's Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 2 (8.70%) NIST
2 1 (4.35%) GDPR
2 1 (4.35%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 1 (4.35%) NCSC
2 1 (4.35%) NIST 800
2 1 (4.35%) PCI DSS
System Software
1 10 (43.48%) VMware Infrastructure
2 6 (26.09%) Docker
2 6 (26.09%) VMware NSX
3 5 (21.74%) Active Directory
4 2 (8.70%) Hyper-V
4 2 (8.70%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 6 (26.09%) Kubernetes
1 6 (26.09%) Terraform
2 5 (21.74%) Ansible
3 4 (17.39%) FortiGate
4 3 (13.04%) vRealize
5 2 (8.70%) Grafana
5 2 (8.70%) Prometheus
5 2 (8.70%) Puppet
5 2 (8.70%) vRealize Orchestrator
6 1 (4.35%) Dell DRAC
6 1 (4.35%) Failover Clustering
6 1 (4.35%) Nagios
6 1 (4.35%) Progress Chef
6 1 (4.35%) VxRail
Vendors
1 11 (47.83%) VMware
2 8 (34.78%) Cisco
3 6 (26.09%) Palo Alto
3 6 (26.09%) Red Hat
4 4 (17.39%) Citrix
5 2 (8.70%) Dell
5 2 (8.70%) F5
5 2 (8.70%) Meraki
5 2 (8.70%) Microsoft
5 2 (8.70%) Splunk
6 1 (4.35%) Aruba
6 1 (4.35%) Atlassian
6 1 (4.35%) Fortinet
6 1 (4.35%) Google
6 1 (4.35%) IBM
6 1 (4.35%) NVIDIA
6 1 (4.35%) SaltStack
6 1 (4.35%) SolarWinds
6 1 (4.35%) Veeam
6 1 (4.35%) Zscaler