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 26 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
26 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 12 33 42
Rank change year-on-year +21 +9 +23
Contract jobs citing Continuous Improvement 685 185 204
As % of all contract jobs in the South East 10.35% 5.23% 4.51%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.85% 5.88% 5.46%
Number of daily rates quoted 390 105 104
10th Percentile £331 £323 £357
25th Percentile £431 £413 £448
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £538 £500 £502
Median % change year-on-year +7.50% -0.40% -8.73%
75th Percentile £600 £600 £638
90th Percentile £700 £640 £659
England median daily rate £520 £500 £528
% change year-on-year +4.00% -5.21% -8.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 57 16 9
10th Percentile £13.71 £12.50 £13.25
25th Percentile £20.13 £15.13 £25.99
Median hourly rate £60.00 £15.25 £52.50
Median % change year-on-year +293.44% -70.95% -10.00%
75th Percentile £85.00 £58.00 £58.75
90th Percentile £87.98 £64.08 £60.73
England median hourly rate £32.00 £24.17 £50.00
% change year-on-year +32.42% -51.67% -23.08%

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 5,330 3,144 3,739
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the South East 80.51% 88.96% 82.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 3,165 1,965 2,231
10th Percentile £275 £219 £256
25th Percentile £419 £375 £404
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £500 £510
Median % change year-on-year +5.00% -1.96% -1.92%
75th Percentile £615 £588 £625
90th Percentile £709 £650 £688
England median daily rate £525 £510 £525
% change year-on-year +2.94% -2.86% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 642 310 223
10th Percentile £13.44 £13.48 £16.05
25th Percentile £16.38 £15.91 £30.21
Median hourly rate £49.00 £21.82 £57.50
Median % change year-on-year +124.54% -62.05% +9.52%
75th Percentile £70.00 £50.00 £70.43
90th Percentile £87.83 £69.65 £78.40
England median hourly rate £41.56 £25.15 £43.00
% change year-on-year +65.23% -41.51% -1.94%

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 26 September 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 26 September 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 26 September 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 +23 312 £550 +10.00% 567
Berkshire +25 217 £550 +15.18% 273
Hampshire +16 204 £575 +9.52% 294
Buckinghamshire +6 75 £572 +7.67% 147
Surrey +24 71 £450 -10.00% 162
West Sussex +8 44 £467 +21.30% 101
Middlesex - 24 - - 10
Oxfordshire -13 20 £650 -1.89% 149
Kent +6 12 £405 - 53
East Sussex +1 3 £575 +17.95% 59
Sussex -3 2 £600 - 13
Isle of Wight - 1 £400 - 3
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 35 (5.11%) SharePoint
2 14 (2.04%) Confluence
3 4 (0.58%) Apache Spark
4 2 (0.29%) Oracle Application Server
4 2 (0.29%) Smallworld
5 1 (0.15%) Apache
5 1 (0.15%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (0.15%) Apache Superset
5 1 (0.15%) Microsoft Exchange
5 1 (0.15%) SharePoint 2010
5 1 (0.15%) SharePoint 2013
Applications
1 71 (10.36%) Microsoft Excel
2 34 (4.96%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 27 (3.94%) Microsoft Project
4 16 (2.34%) Microsoft Office
5 2 (0.29%) Chatbot
5 2 (0.29%) Spreadsheet
6 1 (0.15%) AutoCAD
6 1 (0.15%) CINEMA 4D
6 1 (0.15%) Houdini
6 1 (0.15%) MicroStation
6 1 (0.15%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.15%) NUKE
6 1 (0.15%) Revit
Business Applications
1 16 (2.34%) SAP S/4HANA
2 5 (0.73%) Primavera
3 4 (0.58%) Dynamics CRM
3 4 (0.58%) Oracle ERP
4 3 (0.44%) iTrent
4 3 (0.44%) Maximo
4 3 (0.44%) NEC Housing
4 3 (0.44%) Workday HCM
5 2 (0.29%) Salesforce CRM
5 2 (0.29%) SAP BRIM
5 2 (0.29%) SAP PSCD
5 2 (0.29%) SAP SD
6 1 (0.15%) Oracle EBS
6 1 (0.15%) Oracle EBS R12
6 1 (0.15%) Remedy ITSM
6 1 (0.15%) SAP BPC
6 1 (0.15%) SAP FI
6 1 (0.15%) SAP FI-CA
6 1 (0.15%) SAP MM
6 1 (0.15%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 132 (19.27%) Azure
2 105 (15.33%) AWS
3 36 (5.26%) Power Platform
4 33 (4.82%) GCP
5 25 (3.65%) Azure DevOps
6 24 (3.50%) GitHub
6 24 (3.50%) SaaS
7 23 (3.36%) Entra ID
8 18 (2.63%) Microsoft 365
9 15 (2.19%) Amazon CloudWatch
9 15 (2.19%) Azure Monitor
9 15 (2.19%) Serverless
10 14 (2.04%) GitHub Actions
11 13 (1.90%) OpenShift
12 11 (1.61%) Datadog
13 8 (1.17%) AWS CloudFormation
13 8 (1.17%) AWS Lambda
13 8 (1.17%) OCI
14 7 (1.02%) Azure AKS
15 6 (0.88%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 29 (4.23%) DNS
2 23 (3.36%) Network Security
3 17 (2.48%) Firewall
4 13 (1.90%) DHCP
4 13 (1.90%) LAN
5 10 (1.46%) Broadband
6 9 (1.31%) TCP/IP
7 8 (1.17%) WAN
8 7 (1.02%) SD-WAN
8 7 (1.02%) VPN
8 7 (1.02%) Wi-Fi
9 6 (0.88%) Wireless
10 5 (0.73%) Intranet
10 5 (0.73%) Software-Defined Networking
11 4 (0.58%) DNSSEC
11 4 (0.58%) Radio Access Network
12 3 (0.44%) Intrusion Detection
12 3 (0.44%) MQTT
12 3 (0.44%) VLAN
13 2 (0.29%) Modbus
Database & Business Intelligence
1 33 (4.82%) Power BI
2 17 (2.48%) Metadata
3 16 (2.34%) Relational Database
4 13 (1.90%) Data Warehouse
5 11 (1.61%) PostgreSQL
6 7 (1.02%) Oracle Reports
6 7 (1.02%) Spark SQL
7 6 (0.88%) DynamoDB
7 6 (0.88%) Tableau
8 4 (0.58%) Amazon RDS
9 3 (0.44%) Big Data
9 3 (0.44%) Elasticsearch
9 3 (0.44%) Geospatial Data
9 3 (0.44%) GIS
9 3 (0.44%) NoSQL
9 3 (0.44%) Redis
10 2 (0.29%) Enterprise Data Warehouse
10 2 (0.29%) Oracle ODI
11 1 (0.15%) Couchbase
11 1 (0.15%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 33 (4.82%) JIRA
2 31 (4.53%) Git
3 21 (3.07%) GitLab
4 20 (2.92%) Jenkins
5 15 (2.19%) Selenium
6 8 (1.17%) MSI
7 5 (0.73%) SonarQube
8 2 (0.29%) Cucumber
8 2 (0.29%) Gatling
8 2 (0.29%) JMeter
8 2 (0.29%) LoadRunner
8 2 (0.29%) REST Assured
8 2 (0.29%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.15%) ERwin
9 1 (0.15%) Hudson
9 1 (0.15%) JUnit
9 1 (0.15%) Mockito
9 1 (0.15%) SoapUI
9 1 (0.15%) Subversion
9 1 (0.15%) TestRail
General
1 332 (48.47%) Social Skills
2 194 (28.32%) Analytical Skills
3 118 (17.23%) Finance
4 76 (11.09%) Public Sector
5 54 (7.88%) Aerospace
6 49 (7.15%) Organisational Skills
7 33 (4.82%) Influencing Skills
8 29 (4.23%) Manufacturing
9 25 (3.65%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 20 (2.92%) Telecoms
11 19 (2.77%) Retail
12 18 (2.63%) Legal
13 16 (2.34%) Documentation Skills
14 15 (2.19%) French Language
14 15 (2.19%) Presentation Skills
14 15 (2.19%) Spanish Language
15 14 (2.04%) Military
16 11 (1.61%) Electronics
17 8 (1.17%) Games
17 8 (1.17%) Local Government
Job Titles
1 87 (12.70%) Lead
2 81 (11.82%) Analyst
3 64 (9.34%) Senior
4 62 (9.05%) Architect
5 43 (6.28%) Delivery Manager
6 27 (3.94%) Product Manager
7 24 (3.50%) Consultant
8 23 (3.36%) Data Analyst
9 18 (2.63%) IT Manager
9 18 (2.63%) Project Manager
9 18 (2.63%) Senior Manager
9 18 (2.63%) Service Manager
10 17 (2.48%) Product Delivery Manager
11 16 (2.34%) Security Analyst
12 15 (2.19%) 2nd Line Support
12 15 (2.19%) 2nd Line Technical Support
12 15 (2.19%) Technical Support
13 14 (2.04%) Infrastructure Engineer
13 14 (2.04%) Solutions Architect
14 13 (1.90%) Infrastructure Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 55 (8.03%) Terraform
2 14 (2.04%) REST
3 11 (1.61%) .NET
3 11 (1.61%) ARM Templates
4 10 (1.46%) Kafka
4 10 (1.46%) OAuth
4 10 (1.46%) PySpark
4 10 (1.46%) SOAP
5 9 (1.31%) RESTful
6 8 (1.17%) SAML
7 7 (1.02%) EDI
7 7 (1.02%) Middleware
7 7 (1.02%) OpenID
8 6 (0.88%) JSON
8 6 (0.88%) LDAP
8 6 (0.88%) React
9 5 (0.73%) GraphQL
9 5 (0.73%) HTML
9 5 (0.73%) OAuth2
10 4 (0.58%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 59 (8.61%) Product Ownership
2 39 (5.69%) Cloud Native
2 39 (5.69%) Onboarding
3 36 (5.26%) Management Information System
4 23 (3.36%) Operational Technology
5 18 (2.63%) Hybrid Cloud
5 18 (2.63%) Security Posture
6 17 (2.48%) Data Centre
7 15 (2.19%) CMDB
8 14 (2.04%) Cyber Threat
8 14 (2.04%) Enterprise Software
9 12 (1.75%) PMI
10 11 (1.61%) Data Protection Act
10 11 (1.61%) Security Operations Centre
10 11 (1.61%) Self-Motivation
10 11 (1.61%) Virtual Team
11 10 (1.46%) Social Media
12 9 (1.31%) Analytical Mindset
13 8 (1.17%) Animation
13 8 (1.17%) Graphic Design
Operating Systems
1 79 (11.53%) Windows
2 37 (5.40%) Linux
3 23 (3.36%) Windows Server
4 7 (1.02%) Windows Server 2019
5 5 (0.73%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6 2 (0.29%) Windows 10
7 1 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
7 1 (0.15%) Mac OS
7 1 (0.15%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 252 (36.79%) Agile
2 208 (30.36%) Problem-Solving
3 195 (28.47%) Stakeholder Management
4 152 (22.19%) Stakeholder Engagement
5 126 (18.39%) ITIL
6 109 (15.91%) Roadmaps
7 103 (15.04%) Decision-Making
8 97 (14.16%) DevOps
9 96 (14.01%) CI/CD
9 96 (14.01%) Service Delivery
10 92 (13.43%) Service Management
11 84 (12.26%) Cybersecurity
12 83 (12.12%) Project Delivery
13 76 (11.09%) Change Management
14 74 (10.80%) ITSM
15 72 (10.51%) Validation
16 69 (10.07%) Infrastructure as Code
17 64 (9.34%) AI
18 63 (9.20%) PRINCE2
19 61 (8.91%) Risk Management
Programming Languages
1 86 (12.55%) Python
2 74 (10.80%) SQL
3 52 (7.59%) PowerShell
4 28 (4.09%) Bash
5 17 (2.48%) Java
6 9 (1.31%) Bicep
7 8 (1.17%) JavaScript
8 7 (1.02%) C#
9 6 (0.88%) Apex Code
9 6 (0.88%) TypeScript
10 5 (0.73%) Go
11 4 (0.58%) Shell Script
12 3 (0.44%) PL/SQL
12 3 (0.44%) Rust
13 2 (0.29%) Kusto Query Language
13 2 (0.29%) Magik
14 1 (0.15%) ABAP
14 1 (0.15%) Groovy
14 1 (0.15%) Perl
14 1 (0.15%) VBA
Qualifications
1 340 (49.64%) Security Cleared
2 189 (27.59%) SC Cleared
3 125 (18.25%) DV Cleared
4 111 (16.20%) Degree
5 36 (5.26%) PMI Certification
6 26 (3.80%) PMP
7 21 (3.07%) Computer Science Degree
8 19 (2.77%) Azure Certification
9 18 (2.63%) BPSS Clearance
10 16 (2.34%) CISSP
11 14 (2.04%) ACCA
11 14 (2.04%) AWS Certification
11 14 (2.04%) CIMA
11 14 (2.04%) ITIL Certification
12 11 (1.61%) Cisco Certification
13 9 (1.31%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
14 7 (1.02%) Master's Degree
14 7 (1.02%) PRINCE2 Certification
15 6 (0.88%) CCNP
15 6 (0.88%) Microsoft Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 60 (8.76%) QA
2 54 (7.88%) PMO
3 50 (7.30%) Data Quality
4 32 (4.67%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 22 (3.21%) NIST
6 19 (2.77%) GDPR
7 18 (2.63%) SLA
8 13 (1.90%) NCSC
9 12 (1.75%) ISO 9001
10 7 (1.02%) Cyber Essentials
11 6 (0.88%) GRC
12 5 (0.73%) Def Stans
12 5 (0.73%) ISO 22301
12 5 (0.73%) NIST 800
13 2 (0.29%) Accessibility
13 2 (0.29%) Disclosure Scotland
13 2 (0.29%) ISO/IEC 20000
13 2 (0.29%) Sarbanes-Oxley
14 1 (0.15%) California Consumer Privacy Act
14 1 (0.15%) ITGC
System Software
1 33 (4.82%) Active Directory
2 28 (4.09%) VMware Infrastructure
3 27 (3.94%) Docker
4 8 (1.17%) IAG
5 7 (1.02%) VMware NSX
5 7 (1.02%) vSphere
6 6 (0.88%) Hyper-V
7 5 (0.73%) Virtual Desktop
7 5 (0.73%) Virtual Machines
8 3 (0.44%) VMware ESXi
9 2 (0.29%) Microsoft Virtual Server
9 2 (0.29%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 51 (7.45%) Kubernetes
2 36 (5.26%) Ansible
3 12 (1.75%) Grafana
4 11 (1.61%) WMI
5 10 (1.46%) Microsoft Intune
6 8 (1.17%) Prometheus
6 8 (1.17%) Puppet
7 7 (1.02%) SCCM
8 5 (0.73%) Progress Chef
9 4 (0.58%) Active Directory Federation Services
10 3 (0.44%) Argo
10 3 (0.44%) MOM
10 3 (0.44%) Podman
10 3 (0.44%) Single Sign-On
11 2 (0.29%) CASB
11 2 (0.29%) CSIRT
11 2 (0.29%) Istio
11 2 (0.29%) Rancher
11 2 (0.29%) vCenter Server
11 2 (0.29%) vRealize
Vendors
1 148 (21.61%) Microsoft
2 45 (6.57%) ServiceNow
3 43 (6.28%) SAP
4 34 (4.96%) VMware
5 23 (3.36%) Oracle
6 17 (2.48%) Databricks
6 17 (2.48%) Salesforce
7 14 (2.04%) Google
8 11 (1.61%) Dynatrace
8 11 (1.61%) Juniper
9 8 (1.17%) Cisco
9 8 (1.17%) Nexthink
9 8 (1.17%) Workday
10 6 (0.88%) Baan
10 6 (0.88%) Red Hat
10 6 (0.88%) Splunk
10 6 (0.88%) Virgin Media
11 5 (0.73%) SolarWinds
12 4 (0.58%) EMC
12 4 (0.58%) Infoblox