Critical Thinking Contracts

Critical Thinking
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Critical Thinking skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Critical Thinking over the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 365 359 431
Rank change year-on-year -6 +72 +26
Contract jobs citing Critical Thinking 159 228 300
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.54% 0.52% 0.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.60% 0.61% 0.56%
Number of daily rates quoted 94 150 199
10th Percentile £307 £254 £350
25th Percentile £433 £378 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £525 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.76% - +5.00%
75th Percentile £613 £625 £625
90th Percentile £721 £750 £838
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £525 £475
% change year-on-year +4.76% +10.53% -1.04%
Number of hourly rates quoted 3 9 20
10th Percentile £35.90 £22.14 £20.10
25th Percentile £38.56 £25.09 £20.22
Median hourly rate £43.00 £26.00 £21.67
Median % change year-on-year +65.38% +19.98% -59.50%
75th Percentile £69.00 £35.00 £37.12
90th Percentile £84.60 £45.00 £50.42
UK excluding London median hourly rate £35.25 £30.18 £20.71
% change year-on-year +16.80% +45.76% -66.21%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Critical Thinking 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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 26,594 37,597 53,655
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.84% 86.31% 89.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,149 24,227 37,238
10th Percentile £308 £300 £325
25th Percentile £413 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +4.76%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £650
90th Percentile £743 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.50% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,071 2,443 1,746
10th Percentile £14.41 £12.75 £11.00
25th Percentile £18.21 £16.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £29.00 £35.65 £37.30
Median % change year-on-year -18.65% -4.42% +49.20%
75th Percentile £60.38 £59.98 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £37.34 £36.00
% change year-on-year -26.35% +3.72% +80.00%

Critical Thinking
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Critical Thinking as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Critical Thinking.

Daily rate trend for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Critical Thinking over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Critical Thinking.

Hourly rate trend for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Critical Thinking over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Top 16 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Critical Thinking within the UK over the 6 months to 1 May 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
England -3 132 £550 +4.76% 520
UK excluding London +42 101 £550 +4.76% 293
Work from Home +37 61 £544 +25.72% 258
London +5 51 £508 -9.78% 295
South West +70 41 £569 +5.81% 41
Scotland +21 19 £495 +10.00% 23
South East +37 12 £563 +4.65% 91
North of England +9 11 £504 -13.04% 70
East of England +29 8 £500 - 37
Yorkshire +11 7 £507 -22.00% 11
Midlands -3 5 £463 +68.18% 40
North West +4 4 £500 -8.76% 55
Northern Ireland -5 4 £675 +107.69% 4
West Midlands +6 3 £463 -23.81% 30
East Midlands -7 2 - - 7
Wales -11 1 £413 -31.25% 9

Critical Thinking
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 24 (15.09%) Confluence
2 9 (5.66%) Microsoft Exchange
3 7 (4.40%) SAS
3 7 (4.40%) SharePoint
4 4 (2.52%) Skype for Business
5 2 (1.26%) Apache
5 2 (1.26%) Apache Airflow
6 1 (0.63%) Adobe Experience Manager
6 1 (0.63%) Apache Spark
6 1 (0.63%) CMS
6 1 (0.63%) JBoss
6 1 (0.63%) nginx
6 1 (0.63%) Tomcat
6 1 (0.63%) WebSphere
Applications
1 27 (16.98%) Microsoft Office
2 12 (7.55%) Microsoft Excel
3 10 (6.29%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 8 (5.03%) Microsoft Project
5 2 (1.26%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 7 (4.40%) SAP Oil and Gas
1 7 (4.40%) SAP S/4HANA
2 2 (1.26%) Salesforce CRM
3 1 (0.63%) Dynamics NAV
3 1 (0.63%) NetSuite
3 1 (0.63%) Oracle Financials
3 1 (0.63%) SAP ERP
3 1 (0.63%) SAP GRC
3 1 (0.63%) Workfront
Cloud Services
1 21 (13.21%) Azure
2 18 (11.32%) AWS
2 18 (11.32%) Power Platform
3 14 (8.81%) Cloud Computing
4 10 (6.29%) GCP
5 7 (4.40%) Adobe Analytics
6 6 (3.77%) GitHub
7 5 (3.14%) Power Automate
8 4 (2.52%) Azure DevOps
9 3 (1.89%) Azure AKS
9 3 (1.89%) Azure Monitor
9 3 (1.89%) Copilot Studio
9 3 (1.89%) dbt
9 3 (1.89%) Microsoft 365
9 3 (1.89%) Microsoft Copilot
9 3 (1.89%) PowerApps
10 2 (1.26%) Azure Machine Learning
10 2 (1.26%) Azure Sentinel
10 2 (1.26%) Azure Synapse Analytics
10 2 (1.26%) Smartsheet
Communications & Networking
1 10 (6.29%) Skype
2 8 (5.03%) DNS
2 8 (5.03%) Firewall
3 7 (4.40%) VPN
4 6 (3.77%) DHCP
5 5 (3.14%) Unified Communications
6 3 (1.89%) BGP
6 3 (1.89%) Cisco ISE
6 3 (1.89%) Wireless
7 2 (1.26%) Cisco ASA
7 2 (1.26%) FTP
7 2 (1.26%) HTTP
7 2 (1.26%) iSCSI
7 2 (1.26%) OSPF
7 2 (1.26%) SAN
7 2 (1.26%) SMTP
7 2 (1.26%) SSL
7 2 (1.26%) TCP/IP
8 1 (0.63%) Cisco Nexus
8 1 (0.63%) SWIFTNet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 18 (11.32%) Power BI
2 13 (8.18%) Relational Database
3 11 (6.92%) Data Warehouse
4 5 (3.14%) Metadata
5 4 (2.52%) Tableau
6 3 (1.89%) Snowflake Schema
7 2 (1.26%) BusinessObjects
7 2 (1.26%) BusinessObjects Business Intelligence
7 2 (1.26%) Data Vault
7 2 (1.26%) NoSQL
7 2 (1.26%) PostgreSQL
8 1 (0.63%) Big Data
8 1 (0.63%) BigQuery
8 1 (0.63%) Data Mining
8 1 (0.63%) Hadoop
8 1 (0.63%) KDB
8 1 (0.63%) Looker
8 1 (0.63%) MongoDB
8 1 (0.63%) SAP HANA
8 1 (0.63%) Tableau Server
Development Applications
1 26 (16.35%) JIRA
2 7 (4.40%) Git
3 6 (3.77%) Bitbucket
4 3 (1.89%) Jenkins
5 2 (1.26%) GitLab
6 1 (0.63%) Atlassian Bamboo
6 1 (0.63%) Gradle
6 1 (0.63%) Hudson
6 1 (0.63%) IntelliJ
6 1 (0.63%) SonarQube
6 1 (0.63%) Team Foundation Server
6 1 (0.63%) TeamCity
6 1 (0.63%) Terragrunt
6 1 (0.63%) webpack
General
1 115 (72.33%) Social Skills
2 74 (46.54%) Finance
3 65 (40.88%) Analytical Skills
4 30 (18.87%) Banking
5 26 (16.35%) Public Sector
6 15 (9.43%) Presentation Skills
7 14 (8.81%) Marketing
8 13 (8.18%) Investment Banking
9 12 (7.55%) Organisational Skills
10 9 (5.66%) Influencing Skills
10 9 (5.66%) Manufacturing
11 7 (4.40%) Front Office
12 4 (2.52%) Pharmaceutical
12 4 (2.52%) Telecoms
13 3 (1.89%) Documentation Skills
13 3 (1.89%) Financial Institution
13 3 (1.89%) German Language
14 2 (1.26%) Advertising
14 2 (1.26%) French Language
14 2 (1.26%) Italian Language
Job Titles
1 22 (13.84%) Analyst
2 14 (8.81%) Lead
3 12 (7.55%) Business Analyst
3 12 (7.55%) Senior
3 12 (7.55%) Virtualisation Engineer
4 10 (6.29%) Analytics Manager
4 10 (6.29%) Architect
4 10 (6.29%) Project Manager
5 9 (5.66%) Coordinator
6 8 (5.03%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 8 (5.03%) Developer
6 8 (5.03%) JavaScript Engineer
6 8 (5.03%) Python Engineer
7 7 (4.40%) Consultant
7 7 (4.40%) Data Analytics Manager
7 7 (4.40%) Data Manager
7 7 (4.40%) Insight Manager
7 7 (4.40%) Strategy Manager
8 6 (3.77%) Security Assurance Coordinator
8 6 (3.77%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (7.55%) Flash
2 5 (3.14%) CSS
2 5 (3.14%) HTML
2 5 (3.14%) YAML
3 4 (2.52%) AngularJS
3 4 (2.52%) PySpark
4 3 (1.89%) JSON
4 3 (1.89%) REST
4 3 (1.89%) Spring
5 2 (1.26%) .NET
5 2 (1.26%) Ajax
5 2 (1.26%) JMS
5 2 (1.26%) Kafka
5 2 (1.26%) Middleware
5 2 (1.26%) OpenTelemetry
5 2 (1.26%) React
5 2 (1.26%) RESTful
5 2 (1.26%) Web Services
5 2 (1.26%) ZeroMQ
6 1 (0.63%) Material-UI
Miscellaneous
1 21 (13.21%) Distributed Systems
1 21 (13.21%) Management Information System
2 12 (7.55%) Clustering
3 11 (6.92%) PKI
4 9 (5.66%) Data Centre
5 8 (5.03%) Cloud Native
5 8 (5.03%) Self-Motivation
6 7 (4.40%) Life Science
6 7 (4.40%) Renewable Energy
7 6 (3.77%) Algorithms
7 6 (3.77%) Data Structures
7 6 (3.77%) PMI
8 4 (2.52%) Data Protection Act
8 4 (2.52%) e-Learning
8 4 (2.52%) Hedge funds
8 4 (2.52%) Learning Management System
8 4 (2.52%) Onboarding
8 4 (2.52%) Product Ownership
9 3 (1.89%) Fixed Income
9 3 (1.89%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 14 (8.81%) Windows
2 13 (8.18%) Windows Server
3 9 (5.66%) Windows Server 2012
4 8 (5.03%) Windows 10
5 7 (4.40%) Linux
6 3 (1.89%) Windows Server 2016
7 2 (1.26%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 91 (57.23%) Problem-Solving
2 72 (45.28%) Agile
3 37 (23.27%) Project Management
4 32 (20.13%) Analytics
5 31 (19.50%) Computer Science
6 30 (18.87%) Stakeholder Management
6 30 (18.87%) Waterfall
7 28 (17.61%) Decision-Making
8 23 (14.47%) Service Management
9 21 (13.21%) Artificial Intelligence
9 21 (13.21%) Risk Management
9 21 (13.21%) System Testing
10 20 (12.58%) Continuous Improvement
10 20 (12.58%) Machine Learning
11 18 (11.32%) Change Management
11 18 (11.32%) Data Security
11 18 (11.32%) NsoIT
11 18 (11.32%) Time Management
12 17 (10.69%) Data Science
12 17 (10.69%) Infrastructure Engineering
Programming Languages
1 36 (22.64%) SQL
2 32 (20.13%) Python
3 19 (11.95%) Java
4 16 (10.06%) JavaScript
5 14 (8.81%) PowerShell
6 13 (8.18%) TypeScript
7 9 (5.66%) R
8 5 (3.14%) Bicep
9 4 (2.52%) C++
10 2 (1.26%) C#
10 2 (1.26%) Kusto Query Language
11 1 (0.63%) JCL
11 1 (0.63%) PL/SQL
11 1 (0.63%) REXX
Qualifications
1 58 (36.48%) Degree
2 32 (20.13%) Security Cleared
3 31 (19.50%) SC Cleared
4 22 (13.84%) Master's Degree
5 16 (10.06%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
6 15 (9.43%) Cisco Certification
7 14 (8.81%) Microsoft Certification
8 12 (7.55%) CCNA
9 11 (6.92%) Computer Science Degree
9 11 (6.92%) PMI Certification
10 10 (6.29%) DV Cleared
11 9 (5.66%) MCSE
12 8 (5.03%) AWS Certification
13 6 (3.77%) MCSA
14 5 (3.14%) Azure Certification
14 5 (3.14%) CISSP
14 5 (3.14%) PMP
15 4 (2.52%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
15 4 (2.52%) CCNP
16 3 (1.89%) CISA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 13 (8.18%) PMO
2 7 (4.40%) Data Quality
2 7 (4.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 6 (3.77%) JSP 440
3 6 (3.77%) RMADS
4 5 (3.14%) NIST
5 4 (2.52%) GDPR
5 4 (2.52%) PMBOK
6 3 (1.89%) GRC
7 2 (1.26%) Accessibility
7 2 (1.26%) ISO/IEC 27005
7 2 (1.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
8 1 (0.63%) Actionable Recommendations
8 1 (0.63%) COBIT
8 1 (0.63%) ISO 20022
8 1 (0.63%) P3O
8 1 (0.63%) QA
8 1 (0.63%) SLA
8 1 (0.63%) WCAG
System Software
1 16 (10.06%) VMware Infrastructure
2 12 (7.55%) VMware ESXi
2 12 (7.55%) VMware NSX
3 10 (6.29%) Active Directory
4 3 (1.89%) Hyper-V
4 3 (1.89%) Microsoft Virtual Server
4 3 (1.89%) Virtual Servers
5 2 (1.26%) Docker
5 2 (1.26%) Virtual Machines
6 1 (0.63%) IAG
6 1 (0.63%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 13 (8.18%) vCenter Server
2 7 (4.40%) WSUS
3 5 (3.14%) Terraform
4 3 (1.89%) Ansible
4 3 (1.89%) Kubernetes
5 2 (1.26%) Grafana
5 2 (1.26%) SCOM
6 1 (0.63%) EMC NetWorker
6 1 (0.63%) FortiGate
6 1 (0.63%) PowerCLI
6 1 (0.63%) Puppet
Vendors
1 39 (24.53%) Microsoft
2 18 (11.32%) Atlassian
3 17 (10.69%) Cisco
4 16 (10.06%) VMware
5 12 (7.55%) SAP
6 8 (5.03%) Adobe
7 7 (4.40%) Teradata
8 6 (3.77%) Salesforce
9 4 (2.52%) Fortinet
9 4 (2.52%) Sybase
9 4 (2.52%) Veeam
10 3 (1.89%) Oracle
10 3 (1.89%) SolarWinds
11 2 (1.26%) CheckPoint
11 2 (1.26%) Google
11 2 (1.26%) Infoblox
11 2 (1.26%) Palo Alto
11 2 (1.26%) Planview
11 2 (1.26%) Wrike
12 1 (0.63%) Checkmarx