Thought Leadership Contract Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Thought Leadership
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Thought Leadership skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 14 January 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Jan 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 300 296 352
Rank change year-on-year -4 +56 +30
Contract jobs citing Thought Leadership 94 43 51
As % of all contract jobs in the UK excluding London 0.51% 0.31% 0.26%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.60% 0.35% 0.30%
Number of daily rates quoted 55 17 34
10th Percentile £428 £413 £425
25th Percentile £450 £500 £463
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £525 £545
Median % change year-on-year +4.76% -3.67% -13.49%
75th Percentile £650 £675 £659
90th Percentile £870 £718 £733
UK median daily rate £537 £525 £625
% change year-on-year +2.29% -16.00% -0.79%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 0 3
10th Percentile £22.50 - £77.12
25th Percentile £38.81 - £77.45
Median hourly rate £81.25 - £80.78
75th Percentile £95.63 - £82.82
90th Percentile £100.05 - £83.92
UK median hourly rate £88.75 - £79.39
% change year-on-year - - +0.41%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

Thought Leadership 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 UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 15,617 12,154 16,854
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 85.23% 88.03% 87.21%
Number of daily rates quoted 9,576 7,108 10,751
10th Percentile £223 £235 £250
25th Percentile £375 £380 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £575 £600 £600
90th Percentile £675 £685 £688
UK median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,689 687 1,278
10th Percentile £14.37 £15.50 £14.16
25th Percentile £17.23 £20.00 £16.94
Median hourly rate £23.83 £30.45 £43.83
Median % change year-on-year -21.76% -30.52% +51.12%
75th Percentile £55.00 £63.75 £65.00
90th Percentile £68.02 £73.85 £76.53
UK median hourly rate £25.15 £32.50 £40.50
% change year-on-year -22.62% -19.75% +15.71%

Thought Leadership
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Thought Leadership relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Thought Leadership job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Thought Leadership
Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Thought Leadership.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Thought Leadership

Thought Leadership
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Thought Leadership in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 14 January 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Thought Leadership in the UK excluding London

Thought Leadership
Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Thought Leadership.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Thought Leadership

Thought Leadership
Hourly Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Thought Leadership in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 14 January 2026.

Hourly rate histogram for Thought Leadership in the UK excluding London

Thought Leadership
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Thought Leadership within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 14 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 -17 45 £537 -9.56% 76
South East -25 22 £674 +41.84% 184
Yorkshire -30 22 £600 -11.11% 32
North West -6 21 £450 +5.88% 25
Midlands -30 11 £470 -39.35% 41
South West -23 9 £946 +54.45% 49
East Midlands -17 7 £470 -39.35% 25
Wales - 5 £475 - 17
West Midlands - 4 £519 - 14
Scotland -1 2 £455 -12.58% 18
North East -10 2 - - 19
East of England -14 2 - - 51
Thought Leadership
UK

Thought Leadership
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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 12 (12.77%) Confluence
2 4 (4.26%) Oracle Service Bus
2 4 (4.26%) Oracle SOA Suite
2 4 (4.26%) WebLogic
3 3 (3.19%) Adobe Experience Manager
4 2 (2.13%) Apache
4 2 (2.13%) Apache Airflow
5 1 (1.06%) Apache Spark
5 1 (1.06%) Appian
5 1 (1.06%) CICS
5 1 (1.06%) Tomcat
5 1 (1.06%) WebSphere
5 1 (1.06%) WebSphere Application Server
Applications
1 2 (2.13%) Chatbot
2 1 (1.06%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 4 (4.26%) Oracle BPM
2 1 (1.06%) Dynamics CRM
2 1 (1.06%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
Cloud Services
1 35 (37.23%) AWS
2 28 (29.79%) Azure
3 21 (22.34%) GCP
4 12 (12.77%) Entra ID
5 11 (11.70%) Microsoft 365
6 10 (10.64%) Serverless
7 8 (8.51%) Amazon S3
8 6 (6.38%) GitHub
9 5 (5.32%) AWS Step Functions
10 4 (4.26%) Amazon EC2
10 4 (4.26%) AWS Lambda
10 4 (4.26%) Power Platform
10 4 (4.26%) SaaS
11 3 (3.19%) Amazon ECS
11 3 (3.19%) Amazon EKS
11 3 (3.19%) AWS Fargate
11 3 (3.19%) Google Kubernetes Engine
11 3 (3.19%) Snowflake
12 2 (2.13%) Amazon Bedrock
12 2 (2.13%) Amazon SageMaker
Communications & Networking
1 4 (4.26%) Kerberos
2 3 (3.19%) Firewall
3 2 (2.13%) WAN
4 1 (1.06%) BIG-IP
4 1 (1.06%) Cisco ISE
4 1 (1.06%) DNS
4 1 (1.06%) FCoE
4 1 (1.06%) Fibre Channel
4 1 (1.06%) HTTP
4 1 (1.06%) iSCSI
4 1 (1.06%) LAN
4 1 (1.06%) Multicast
4 1 (1.06%) NAS
4 1 (1.06%) PBX
4 1 (1.06%) SAN
4 1 (1.06%) SSH
4 1 (1.06%) VoIP
4 1 (1.06%) WebEx
4 1 (1.06%) Wi-Fi
4 1 (1.06%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 8 (8.51%) DynamoDB
2 4 (4.26%) NoSQL
3 3 (3.19%) Amazon RDS
3 3 (3.19%) Power BI
4 2 (2.13%) Amazon Aurora
4 2 (2.13%) Oracle Database
4 2 (2.13%) PostgreSQL
5 1 (1.06%) Data Lake
5 1 (1.06%) Data Warehouse
5 1 (1.06%) RDBMS
5 1 (1.06%) Relational Database
5 1 (1.06%) SQL Server
5 1 (1.06%) SQL Server Reporting Services
Development Applications
1 12 (12.77%) JIRA
2 3 (3.19%) Jasmine
2 3 (3.19%) Jenkins
3 2 (2.13%) GitLab
4 1 (1.06%) Cucumber
4 1 (1.06%) Git
4 1 (1.06%) MLflow
4 1 (1.06%) Robot Framework
4 1 (1.06%) Selenium
4 1 (1.06%) SonarQube
4 1 (1.06%) Sonatype Nexus
General
1 36 (38.30%) Social Skills
2 23 (24.47%) Finance
3 19 (20.21%) Influencing Skills
4 17 (18.09%) Analytical Skills
5 10 (10.64%) Public Sector
6 5 (5.32%) Banking
7 3 (3.19%) Marketing
7 3 (3.19%) Military
7 3 (3.19%) Telecoms
8 2 (2.13%) Aerospace
8 2 (2.13%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 2 (2.13%) Presentation Skills
8 2 (2.13%) Publishing
9 1 (1.06%) Documentation Skills
9 1 (1.06%) Law
Job Titles
1 31 (32.98%) Architect
2 17 (18.09%) Lead
3 16 (17.02%) Solutions Architect
4 10 (10.64%) Lead Architect
5 9 (9.57%) Security Architect
5 9 (9.57%) Senior
6 8 (8.51%) Developer
7 7 (7.45%) Lead Solutions Architect
7 7 (7.45%) Security Solutions Architect
8 6 (6.38%) Consultant
9 5 (5.32%) Lead Security Architect
10 4 (4.26%) Design Engineer
10 4 (4.26%) Oracle Consultant
10 4 (4.26%) Technical Architect
11 3 (3.19%) Backend Developer
11 3 (3.19%) Full-Stack Developer
11 3 (3.19%) Java Developer
11 3 (3.19%) Java Mobile Developer
11 3 (3.19%) Mobile Developer
11 3 (3.19%) Programme Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (10.64%) OAuth
2 7 (7.45%) Spring
2 7 (7.45%) Spring Boot
3 6 (6.38%) Middleware
3 6 (6.38%) OAuth2
4 5 (5.32%) AngularJS
4 5 (5.32%) CSS
4 5 (5.32%) CSS3
4 5 (5.32%) HTML
4 5 (5.32%) HTML5
4 5 (5.32%) JSON
4 5 (5.32%) Lambda Expressions
4 5 (5.32%) Node.js
4 5 (5.32%) REST
4 5 (5.32%) RESTful
4 5 (5.32%) Sass
4 5 (5.32%) Spring MVC
4 5 (5.32%) XML
5 4 (4.26%) OpenAPI
5 4 (4.26%) Swagger
Miscellaneous
1 14 (14.89%) Cloud Native
2 11 (11.70%) Management Information System
3 6 (6.38%) Product Ownership
4 4 (4.26%) Onboarding
4 4 (4.26%) Virtual Team
5 3 (3.19%) IoT
6 2 (2.13%) Blog
6 2 (2.13%) Data Protection Act
6 2 (2.13%) Educational Technology
6 2 (2.13%) Mobile App
6 2 (2.13%) Podcast
6 2 (2.13%) Public Cloud
6 2 (2.13%) Self-Motivation
6 2 (2.13%) Social Media
6 2 (2.13%) Team-Oriented Environment
7 1 (1.06%) AI Agents
7 1 (1.06%) Distributed Systems
7 1 (1.06%) IBM Mainframe
7 1 (1.06%) PKI
7 1 (1.06%) Video Conferencing
Operating Systems
1 13 (13.83%) Mac OS
2 12 (12.77%) Windows
3 7 (7.45%) Windows 10
4 2 (2.13%) Linux
5 1 (1.06%) MVS
5 1 (1.06%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 1 (1.06%) Solaris
5 1 (1.06%) zOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 36 (38.30%) Agile
2 32 (34.04%) Roadmaps
3 25 (26.60%) Analytics
4 24 (25.53%) Decision-Making
5 23 (24.47%) Problem-Solving
6 21 (22.34%) Computer Science
6 21 (22.34%) Identity Access Management
7 20 (21.28%) Cybersecurity
8 19 (20.21%) Stakeholder Management
8 19 (20.21%) TOGAF
9 18 (19.15%) Enterprise Architecture
10 17 (18.09%) DevOps
11 16 (17.02%) AI
11 16 (17.02%) Continuous Improvement
11 16 (17.02%) Software Engineering
12 15 (15.96%) User Experience
13 14 (14.89%) Stakeholder Engagement
14 13 (13.83%) Data Protection
14 13 (13.83%) Secrets Management
15 12 (12.77%) Privileged Access Management
Programming Languages
1 11 (11.70%) Bash
1 11 (11.70%) PowerShell
2 10 (10.64%) Java
2 10 (10.64%) SQL
3 7 (7.45%) Python
4 6 (6.38%) TypeScript
5 5 (5.32%) PL/SQL
6 4 (4.26%) Kotlin
7 2 (2.13%) JavaScript
7 2 (2.13%) Scala
8 1 (1.06%) C#
Qualifications
1 27 (28.72%) Degree
1 27 (28.72%) Security Cleared
2 16 (17.02%) TOGAF Certification
3 15 (15.96%) SC Cleared
4 13 (13.83%) Master's Degree
5 12 (12.77%) CISM
5 12 (12.77%) CISSP
6 11 (11.70%) PhD
7 5 (5.32%) AWS Certification
7 5 (5.32%) Azure Certification
8 1 (1.06%) CCNP
8 1 (1.06%) Cisco Certification
8 1 (1.06%) Computer Science Degree
8 1 (1.06%) DV Cleared
8 1 (1.06%) PMI Certification
8 1 (1.06%) PMP
8 1 (1.06%) PRINCE2 Practitioner
8 1 (1.06%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (11.70%) GDPR
1 11 (11.70%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (3.19%) Accessibility
2 3 (3.19%) GRC
3 2 (2.13%) Data Quality
3 2 (2.13%) PMO
4 1 (1.06%) PCI DSS
4 1 (1.06%) QA
4 1 (1.06%) SLA
System Software
1 15 (15.96%) VMware Infrastructure
2 12 (12.77%) Active Directory
3 4 (4.26%) Docker
4 3 (3.19%) ISA Server
5 1 (1.06%) Hyper-V
5 1 (1.06%) KVM
5 1 (1.06%) NFS
5 1 (1.06%) SRDF
5 1 (1.06%) Veritas Cluster Server
5 1 (1.06%) VMware ESXi
5 1 (1.06%) VMware NSX
5 1 (1.06%) vSphere
5 1 (1.06%) Xen
Systems Management
1 11 (11.70%) Microsoft Intune
1 11 (11.70%) SCCM
2 8 (8.51%) Terraform
3 5 (5.32%) Kubernetes
4 4 (4.26%) Ansible
5 3 (3.19%) Single Sign-On
6 2 (2.13%) Istio
6 2 (2.13%) Kibana
6 2 (2.13%) Podman
6 2 (2.13%) Puppet
7 1 (1.06%) Argo
7 1 (1.06%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 19 (20.21%) VMware
2 16 (17.02%) Microsoft
3 13 (13.83%) Google
4 12 (12.77%) BiZZdesign
5 11 (11.70%) Citrix
6 9 (9.57%) Cisco
7 8 (8.51%) Centrify
7 8 (8.51%) CyberArk
8 6 (6.38%) Oracle
9 4 (4.26%) F5
10 3 (3.19%) Adobe
10 3 (3.19%) Databricks
10 3 (3.19%) MuleSoft
10 3 (3.19%) Red Hat
10 3 (3.19%) Splunk
11 2 (2.13%) Juniper
11 2 (2.13%) NetApp
11 2 (2.13%) Palo Alto
11 2 (2.13%) YouTube
12 1 (1.06%) Nokia