OSPF Contract Job Trends in the Thames Valley

Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)
South East > Thames Valley

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the Thames Valley requiring OSPF skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 9 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 99 98 94
Rank change year-on-year -1 -4 +26
Contract jobs citing OSPF 16 25 45
As % of all contract jobs in the Thames Valley 0.94% 1.15% 1.70%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 5.97% 6.83% 8.27%
Number of daily rates quoted 9 16 29
10th Percentile - £463 £371
25th Percentile - £475 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -16.28% -2.27% -
75th Percentile £500 £609 £600
90th Percentile - £686 £643
South East median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 3
10th Percentile - - £19.70
25th Percentile - £18.50 £21.50
Median hourly rate - £19.00 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year - -24.00% +8.70%
75th Percentile - £19.50 £25.25
90th Percentile - - £25.40
South East median hourly rate - £19.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year - -55.29% +84.78%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
Thames Valley

OSPF 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 the Thames Valley.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 268 366 544
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the Thames Valley 15.73% 16.90% 20.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 163 189 338
10th Percentile £223 £248 £205
25th Percentile £325 £400 £326
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £425 £500 £478
Median % change year-on-year -15.00% +4.71% -4.45%
75th Percentile £538 £600 £600
90th Percentile £600 £650 £675
South East median daily rate £488 £500 £450
% change year-on-year -2.50% +11.11% -2.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 5 20
10th Percentile £18.18 £33.60 £16.93
25th Percentile £46.00 £56.25 £20.38
Median hourly rate £83.32 £57.50 £73.17
Median % change year-on-year +44.90% -21.41% +357.30%
75th Percentile £89.63 £75.24 £75.78
90th Percentile £90.87 £82.57 £83.36
South East median hourly rate £55.00 £68.51 £60.00
% change year-on-year -19.72% +14.18% +33.33%

OSPF
Job Vacancy Trend in the Thames Valley

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing OSPF relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the Thames Valley.

OSPF job vacancy trend in the Thames Valley

OSPF
Daily Rate Trend in the Thames Valley

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the Thames Valley citing OSPF.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the Thames Valley citing OSPF

OSPF
Hourly Rate Trend in the Thames Valley

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the Thames Valley citing OSPF.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the Thames Valley citing OSPF

OSPF
Contract Job Locations in the Thames Valley

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing OSPF within the Thames Valley region over the 6 months to 9 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
Berkshire +15 16 £450 -16.28% 2
OSPF
South East

OSPF
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the Thames Valley 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 6 (37.50%) OpenStack
Cloud Services
1 8 (50.00%) OpenShift
2 6 (37.50%) AWS
3 2 (12.50%) GitHub
Communications & Networking
1 16 (100.00%) BGP
2 11 (68.75%) TACACS
3 6 (37.50%) LAN
3 6 (37.50%) MPLS
3 6 (37.50%) SNMP
3 6 (37.50%) VLAN
3 6 (37.50%) WAN
3 6 (37.50%) Wireless
4 5 (31.25%) DNS
4 5 (31.25%) Firewall
4 5 (31.25%) Network Security
4 5 (31.25%) Spanning Tree
4 5 (31.25%) TCP/IP
4 5 (31.25%) VPN
5 4 (25.00%) Ethernet VPN
5 4 (25.00%) Fibre Channel
5 4 (25.00%) IPv6
5 4 (25.00%) SAN
5 4 (25.00%) VSAN
6 1 (6.25%) DHCP
Development Applications
1 2 (12.50%) GitLab
General
1 6 (37.50%) Documentation Skills
1 6 (37.50%) Social Skills
2 4 (25.00%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 6 (37.50%) Designer
1 6 (37.50%) IP Designer
2 4 (25.00%) Network Engineer
3 2 (12.50%) Cloud Engineer
4 1 (6.25%) Cloud Network Engineer
4 1 (6.25%) Telecoms Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 2 (12.50%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 6 (37.50%) Data Centre
1 6 (37.50%) Hybrid Cloud
2 2 (12.50%) Onboarding
3 1 (6.25%) Life Science
Processes & Methodologies
1 6 (37.50%) Incident Response
1 6 (37.50%) Network Virtualisation
1 6 (37.50%) Validation
2 5 (31.25%) Proactive Monitoring
2 5 (31.25%) Security Monitoring
2 5 (31.25%) Security Operations
2 5 (31.25%) SIEM
3 4 (25.00%) Runbook
4 2 (12.50%) CI/CD
4 2 (12.50%) DevOps
4 2 (12.50%) Infrastructure Automation
4 2 (12.50%) Infrastructure Management
5 1 (6.25%) Change Management
5 1 (6.25%) Incident Management
5 1 (6.25%) ITIL
Programming Languages
1 11 (68.75%) Python
Qualifications
1 12 (75.00%) Cisco Certification
2 6 (37.50%) AWS Certification
2 6 (37.50%) CCIE
2 6 (37.50%) JNCIE
3 5 (31.25%) CCNP
3 5 (31.25%) CCSA
3 5 (31.25%) CCSE
3 5 (31.25%) Check Point Certification
4 1 (6.25%) CCNA
System Software
1 6 (37.50%) VMware Infrastructure
1 6 (37.50%) VMware NSX
2 4 (25.00%) Ceph
Systems Management
1 11 (68.75%) Ansible
2 6 (37.50%) Terraform
3 2 (12.50%) Argo
Vendors
1 16 (100.00%) Cisco
2 7 (43.75%) VMware
3 6 (37.50%) F5
3 6 (37.50%) Fortinet
3 6 (37.50%) Juniper
4 5 (31.25%) CheckPoint
4 5 (31.25%) Palo Alto
5 4 (25.00%) Dell
6 2 (12.50%) Red Hat
7 1 (6.25%) Meraki