Continuous Improvement Contract Job Trends in the South East

Continual Improvement
England > South East

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the South East requiring Continuous Improvement skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 17 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
17 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 13 37 38
Rank change year-on-year +24 +1 +27
Contract jobs citing Continuous Improvement 638 178 222
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 9.45% 5.00% 4.59%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 11.71% 5.56% 5.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 364 102 118
10th Percentile £327 £325 £360
25th Percentile £425 £429 £451
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £506 £504
Median % change year-on-year +3.70% +0.45% -8.36%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £700 £650 £688
England median daily rate £513 £500 £525
% change year-on-year +2.50% -4.76% -6.67%
Number of hourly rates quoted 73 12 14
10th Percentile £46.25 - £18.35
25th Percentile £67.47 £15.13 £24.50
Median hourly rate £85.00 £17.58 £36.66
Median % change year-on-year +383.50% -52.05% -23.62%
75th Percentile £88.00 £67.50 £57.50
90th Percentile - £69.89 £59.67
England median hourly rate £45.00 £28.75 £50.00
% change year-on-year +56.52% -42.50% -18.37%

All Process & Methodology Skills
South East

Continuous Improvement falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the South East.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 5,450 3,203 3,999
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 80.74% 89.90% 82.64%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,352 1,999 2,446
10th Percentile £280 £250 £255
25th Percentile £419 £400 £403
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £525
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -4.76% +1.35%
75th Percentile £613 £600 £638
90th Percentile £706 £666 £700
England median daily rate £525 £513 £525
% change year-on-year +2.44% -2.40% -4.53%
Number of hourly rates quoted 607 298 316
10th Percentile £14.00 £13.50 £15.00
25th Percentile £21.16 £15.16 £26.25
Median hourly rate £55.00 £21.74 £57.35
Median % change year-on-year +153.02% -62.10% +14.70%
75th Percentile £78.75 £50.00 £70.05
90th Percentile £88.00 £70.49 £76.86
England median hourly rate £43.96 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +74.79% -41.51% +4.83%

Continuous Improvement
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Continuous Improvement relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East.

Continuous Improvement job vacancy trend in the South East

Continuous Improvement
Daily Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Continuous Improvement.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement
Daily Rate Histogram in the South East

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Continuous Improvement in the South East over the 6 months to 17 August 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Continuous Improvement in the South East

Continuous Improvement
Hourly Rate Trend in the South East

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Continuous Improvement.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Continuous Improvement

Continuous Improvement
Hourly Rate Histogram in the South East

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Continuous Improvement in the South East over the 6 months to 17 August 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Continuous Improvement in the South East

Continuous Improvement
Contract Job Locations in the South East

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Continuous Improvement within the South East region over the 6 months to 17 August 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
Thames Valley +18 302 £544 +4.82% 338
Berkshire +28 215 £525 - 144
Hampshire +22 183 £550 - 182
Buckinghamshire -6 70 £571 +7.39% 110
Surrey +17 64 £450 -10.00% 84
West Sussex -5 39 £483 +7.22% 41
Middlesex - 19 - - 28
Oxfordshire -16 17 £650 +44.44% 88
Kent +5 7 £405 - 60
East Sussex +5 5 £615 +26.15% 35
Sussex - 1 £600 - 6
Continuous Improvement
England

Continuous Improvement
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East 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 30 (4.70%) SharePoint
2 16 (2.51%) Confluence
3 4 (0.63%) Apache Spark
4 2 (0.31%) Oracle Application Server
5 1 (0.16%) Adobe Experience Manager
5 1 (0.16%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.16%) Microsoft Exchange
5 1 (0.16%) SharePoint 2010
5 1 (0.16%) SharePoint 2013
5 1 (0.16%) Smallworld
Applications
1 55 (8.62%) Microsoft Excel
2 25 (3.92%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 22 (3.45%) Microsoft Project
4 15 (2.35%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.31%) Chatbot
6 1 (0.16%) CINEMA 4D
6 1 (0.16%) Houdini
6 1 (0.16%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.16%) NUKE
6 1 (0.16%) Spreadsheet
Business Applications
1 16 (2.51%) SAP S/4HANA
2 6 (0.94%) Primavera
3 4 (0.63%) Oracle ERP
4 3 (0.47%) iTrent
4 3 (0.47%) Maximo
4 3 (0.47%) NEC Housing
4 3 (0.47%) Salesforce CRM
4 3 (0.47%) Workday HCM
5 2 (0.31%) SAP SD
5 2 (0.31%) Teamcenter
6 1 (0.16%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.16%) Oracle EBS R12
6 1 (0.16%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.16%) SAP BPC
6 1 (0.16%) SAP BRIM
6 1 (0.16%) SAP Business One
6 1 (0.16%) SAP Convergent Charging
6 1 (0.16%) SAP PLM
6 1 (0.16%) SAP PSCD
Cloud Services
1 115 (18.03%) Azure
2 78 (12.23%) AWS
3 32 (5.02%) GCP
3 32 (5.02%) Power Platform
4 22 (3.45%) SaaS
5 21 (3.29%) Azure DevOps
5 21 (3.29%) Entra ID
5 21 (3.29%) GitHub
6 16 (2.51%) Microsoft 365
7 13 (2.04%) GitHub Actions
8 12 (1.88%) Azure Monitor
8 12 (1.88%) OpenShift
9 10 (1.57%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 10 (1.57%) Datadog
9 10 (1.57%) Serverless
10 8 (1.25%) AWS CloudFormation
10 8 (1.25%) OCI
11 7 (1.10%) Amazon EKS
12 6 (0.94%) Azure AKS
12 6 (0.94%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 27 (4.23%) DNS
2 25 (3.92%) Network Security
3 16 (2.51%) Firewall
4 13 (2.04%) LAN
5 10 (1.57%) DHCP
6 8 (1.25%) Broadband
6 8 (1.25%) TCP/IP
7 7 (1.10%) WAN
8 6 (0.94%) SD-WAN
8 6 (0.94%) VPN
8 6 (0.94%) Wi-Fi
8 6 (0.94%) Wireless
9 4 (0.63%) DNSSEC
9 4 (0.63%) Intranet
10 3 (0.47%) Intrusion Detection
10 3 (0.47%) MQTT
10 3 (0.47%) Radio Access Network
10 3 (0.47%) VLAN
11 2 (0.31%) Cisco Nexus
11 2 (0.31%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (4.55%) Power BI
2 12 (1.88%) Data Warehouse
3 10 (1.57%) Metadata
4 9 (1.41%) PostgreSQL
5 7 (1.10%) Oracle Reports
5 7 (1.10%) Tableau
6 6 (0.94%) Spark SQL
7 4 (0.63%) DynamoDB
7 4 (0.63%) Geospatial Data
7 4 (0.63%) GIS
7 4 (0.63%) Redis
8 3 (0.47%) Big Data
8 3 (0.47%) Elasticsearch
8 3 (0.47%) NoSQL
9 2 (0.31%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
9 2 (0.31%) Oracle ODI
9 2 (0.31%) Relational Database
9 2 (0.31%) SAP HANA
9 2 (0.31%) SQL Server
10 1 (0.16%) Snowflake Schema
Development Applications
1 29 (4.55%) JIRA
2 27 (4.23%) Rational DOORS
3 18 (2.82%) GitLab
4 17 (2.66%) Jenkins
5 13 (2.04%) Git
6 5 (0.78%) SonarQube
7 3 (0.47%) Cucumber
7 3 (0.47%) Hudson
7 3 (0.47%) MSI
8 2 (0.31%) REST Assured
8 2 (0.31%) Selenium
8 2 (0.31%) Sonatype Nexus
8 2 (0.31%) SpecFlow
9 1 (0.16%) JUnit
9 1 (0.16%) Mockito
9 1 (0.16%) Octopus Deploy
9 1 (0.16%) Postman
9 1 (0.16%) SoapUI
9 1 (0.16%) Subversion
9 1 (0.16%) TestRail
General
1 283 (44.36%) Social Skills
2 178 (27.90%) Analytical Skills
3 117 (18.34%) Finance
4 71 (11.13%) Public Sector
5 66 (10.34%) Aerospace
6 37 (5.80%) Organisational Skills
7 29 (4.55%) Influencing Skills
8 21 (3.29%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 21 (3.29%) Retail
9 18 (2.82%) Legal
9 18 (2.82%) Telecoms
10 16 (2.51%) Documentation Skills
10 16 (2.51%) French Language
10 16 (2.51%) Spanish Language
11 11 (1.72%) Military
11 11 (1.72%) Presentation Skills
12 10 (1.57%) Manufacturing
13 8 (1.25%) Games
13 8 (1.25%) Law
14 7 (1.10%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 85 (13.32%) Analyst
2 75 (11.76%) Lead
3 64 (10.03%) Senior
4 57 (8.93%) Architect
5 47 (7.37%) Delivery Manager
6 45 (7.05%) Product Manager
7 33 (5.17%) Product Delivery Manager
8 23 (3.61%) Systems Manager
9 22 (3.45%) Consultant
9 22 (3.45%) Data Analyst
9 22 (3.45%) Systems Delivery Manager
10 21 (3.29%) IT Manager
11 16 (2.51%) 2nd Line Support
11 16 (2.51%) 2nd Line Technical Support
11 16 (2.51%) Senior Analyst
11 16 (2.51%) Technical Support
12 15 (2.35%) Infrastructure Engineer
12 15 (2.35%) Project Manager
12 15 (2.35%) Security Analyst
12 15 (2.35%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (2.04%) REST
2 11 (1.72%) .NET
2 11 (1.72%) OAuth
2 11 (1.72%) RESTful
2 11 (1.72%) SOAP
3 9 (1.41%) ARM Templates
3 9 (1.41%) Kafka
4 8 (1.25%) PySpark
4 8 (1.25%) SAML
5 7 (1.10%) EDI
5 7 (1.10%) OpenID
6 6 (0.94%) GraphQL
6 6 (0.94%) JSON
6 6 (0.94%) LDAP
6 6 (0.94%) OAuth2
7 5 (0.78%) HTML
7 5 (0.78%) Keycloak
7 5 (0.78%) Middleware
7 5 (0.78%) React
8 4 (0.63%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 80 (12.54%) Product Ownership
2 35 (5.49%) Cloud Native
3 34 (5.33%) Onboarding
4 31 (4.86%) Management Information System
5 27 (4.23%) Data Structures
6 24 (3.76%) Operational Technology
7 19 (2.98%) Security Posture
8 16 (2.51%) Hybrid Cloud
9 14 (2.19%) Analytical Mindset
9 14 (2.19%) Data Centre
10 13 (2.04%) Cyber Threat
10 13 (2.04%) Legacy Systems
11 12 (1.88%) CMDB
12 11 (1.72%) Data Protection Act
12 11 (1.72%) Enterprise Software
12 11 (1.72%) PMI
12 11 (1.72%) Security Operations Centre
12 11 (1.72%) Self-Motivation
13 8 (1.25%) Animation
13 8 (1.25%) Graphic Design
Operating Systems
1 67 (10.50%) Windows
2 33 (5.17%) Linux
3 21 (3.29%) Windows Server
4 7 (1.10%) Windows Server 2019
5 5 (0.78%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 1 (0.16%) Embedded Linux
6 1 (0.16%) Mac OS
6 1 (0.16%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 226 (35.42%) Agile
2 168 (26.33%) Problem-Solving
2 168 (26.33%) Stakeholder Management
3 160 (25.08%) Stakeholder Engagement
4 110 (17.24%) ITIL
5 97 (15.20%) Decision-Making
6 92 (14.42%) Roadmaps
7 87 (13.64%) Service Delivery
8 82 (12.85%) DevOps
9 81 (12.70%) Cybersecurity
10 78 (12.23%) Service Management
11 76 (11.91%) CI/CD
12 69 (10.82%) ITSM
13 67 (10.50%) PRINCE2
14 63 (9.87%) Computer Science
15 62 (9.72%) Change Management
15 62 (9.72%) Project Delivery
16 59 (9.25%) Project Management
17 57 (8.93%) Scaled Agile Framework
18 53 (8.31%) Analytics
Programming Languages
1 61 (9.56%) Python
2 59 (9.25%) SQL
3 40 (6.27%) PowerShell
4 26 (4.08%) Bash
5 17 (2.66%) Java
6 8 (1.25%) C#
7 7 (1.10%) Bicep
7 7 (1.10%) JavaScript
8 5 (0.78%) Apex Code
8 5 (0.78%) TypeScript
9 4 (0.63%) Shell Script
10 3 (0.47%) Go
10 3 (0.47%) PL/SQL
10 3 (0.47%) Rust
11 2 (0.31%) Kusto Query Language
12 1 (0.16%) ABAP
12 1 (0.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
12 1 (0.16%) Groovy
12 1 (0.16%) Kotlin
12 1 (0.16%) Magik
Qualifications
1 323 (50.63%) Security Cleared
2 163 (25.55%) SC Cleared
3 127 (19.91%) Degree
4 105 (16.46%) DV Cleared
5 35 (5.49%) PMI Certification
6 26 (4.08%) PMP
7 18 (2.82%) Azure Certification
8 17 (2.66%) ACCA
8 17 (2.66%) BPSS Clearance
8 17 (2.66%) CIMA
8 17 (2.66%) Computer Science Degree
9 15 (2.35%) CISSP
10 13 (2.04%) AWS Certification
11 10 (1.57%) Cisco Certification
12 9 (1.41%) ITIL Certification
12 9 (1.41%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
13 6 (0.94%) CCNP
13 6 (0.94%) CISM
13 6 (0.94%) Master's Degree
14 5 (0.78%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 53 (8.31%) QA
2 50 (7.84%) Data Quality
3 47 (7.37%) PMO
4 31 (4.86%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 20 (3.13%) NIST
6 19 (2.98%) GDPR
7 16 (2.51%) NCSC
8 15 (2.35%) SLA
9 8 (1.25%) ISO 9001
10 7 (1.10%) Cyber Essentials
11 6 (0.94%) GRC
11 6 (0.94%) ISO 22301
12 4 (0.63%) Accessibility
13 3 (0.47%) ISO 31000
14 2 (0.31%) Def Stans
14 2 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
14 2 (0.31%) ISO/IEC 20000
14 2 (0.31%) NIST 800
14 2 (0.31%) Sarbanes-Oxley
15 1 (0.16%) COBIT
System Software
1 29 (4.55%) Active Directory
2 27 (4.23%) Docker
3 24 (3.76%) VMware Infrastructure
4 6 (0.94%) IAG
5 5 (0.78%) Virtual Desktop
5 5 (0.78%) Virtual Machines
5 5 (0.78%) vSphere
6 4 (0.63%) VMware NSX
7 3 (0.47%) Hyper-V
7 3 (0.47%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 46 (7.21%) Terraform
2 44 (6.90%) Kubernetes
3 32 (5.02%) Ansible
4 11 (1.72%) Grafana
5 8 (1.25%) Microsoft Intune
5 8 (1.25%) Prometheus
5 8 (1.25%) Puppet
6 7 (1.10%) SCCM
7 5 (0.78%) Progress Chef
7 5 (0.78%) WMI
8 4 (0.63%) Active Directory Federation Services
9 3 (0.47%) Argo
9 3 (0.47%) Podman
9 3 (0.47%) Single Sign-On
10 2 (0.31%) CASB
10 2 (0.31%) CSIRT
10 2 (0.31%) Rancher
10 2 (0.31%) vCenter Server
11 1 (0.16%) Istio
11 1 (0.16%) Kubeflow
Vendors
1 111 (17.40%) Microsoft
2 46 (7.21%) SAP
2 46 (7.21%) ServiceNow
3 33 (5.17%) VMware
4 26 (4.08%) Oracle
5 25 (3.92%) IBM
6 17 (2.66%) Salesforce
7 14 (2.19%) Databricks
7 14 (2.19%) Google
8 11 (1.72%) Juniper
9 10 (1.57%) Dynatrace
10 8 (1.25%) Cisco
10 8 (1.25%) Workday
11 7 (1.10%) Red Hat
11 7 (1.10%) Splunk
12 6 (0.94%) Baan
12 6 (0.94%) Nexthink
12 6 (0.94%) Virgin Media
13 5 (0.78%) SolarWinds
14 4 (0.63%) Infoblox