Data Strategy Contracts

Data Strategy
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies requiring Data Strategy skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Data Strategy 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 299 310 393
Rank change year-on-year +11 +83 +105
Contract jobs citing Data Strategy 240 293 351
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.82% 0.67% 0.59%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.90% 0.78% 0.65%
Number of daily rates quoted 161 212 240
10th Percentile £358 £476 £425
25th Percentile £463 £554 £513
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £691 £600
Median % change year-on-year -16.82% +15.21% -4.00%
75th Percentile £650 £775 £703
90th Percentile £775 £925 £776
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £650 £625
% change year-on-year -19.23% +4.00% +4.17%
Number of hourly rates quoted 4 2 8
10th Percentile £36.78 £62.37 £34.31
25th Percentile £53.31 £65.17 £35.00
Median hourly rate £72.75 £70.09 £49.00
Median % change year-on-year +3.80% +43.03% -
75th Percentile £82.25 £74.75 £66.00
90th Percentile - £77.40 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £80.50 £70.09 £64.50
% change year-on-year +14.86% +8.66% -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Data Strategy 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%

Data Strategy
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Data Strategy as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Data Strategy in the UK

Data Strategy
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Data Strategy.

Daily rate trend for Data Strategy in the UK

Data Strategy
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Data Strategy over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Data Strategy in the UK

Data Strategy
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Data Strategy.

Hourly rate trend for Data Strategy in the UK

Data Strategy
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Data Strategy over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Data Strategy in the UK

Data Strategy
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 Data Strategy 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 +15 211 £575 -17.86% 439
London +7 123 £591 -18.48% 291
Work from Home +32 88 £525 -19.23% 228
UK excluding London +31 81 £525 -19.23% 241
North of England +10 34 £463 -31.58% 36
North West +3 20 £613 -7.62% 26
South West +39 15 £625 -1.96% 25
Midlands +19 15 £488 -14.85% 28
Yorkshire +10 13 £145 -81.29% 8
West Midlands +12 11 £525 -7.89% 17
East of England +36 10 £575 +27.78% 9
South East +36 9 £575 -14.81% 123
East Midlands +10 4 £358 -39.06% 7
Scotland +2 4 £549 -2.49% 18
North East +1 3 £775 - 2
Northern Ireland - 2 £525 - 2

Data Strategy
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 17 (7.08%) Apache Spark
2 10 (4.17%) Apache Airflow
3 7 (2.92%) Apache
4 5 (2.08%) Confluence
4 5 (2.08%) SharePoint
5 1 (0.42%) Luigi
5 1 (0.42%) SAS
Applications
1 14 (5.83%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.42%) CATIA
2 1 (0.42%) Chatbot
2 1 (0.42%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.42%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 1 (0.42%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 6 (2.50%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.25%) Eloqua
2 3 (1.25%) SAP BPC
3 2 (0.83%) iTrent
3 2 (0.83%) Unit4 Business World
4 1 (0.42%) Dynamics AX
4 1 (0.42%) Dynamics CRM
4 1 (0.42%) Oracle ERP
4 1 (0.42%) Salesforce CRM
4 1 (0.42%) SAP MDG
4 1 (0.42%) SAP PM
Cloud Services
1 80 (33.33%) Azure
2 52 (21.67%) AWS
3 46 (19.17%) Power Platform
4 36 (15.00%) GCP
5 34 (14.17%) Snowflake
6 13 (5.42%) Azure Data Factory
7 10 (4.17%) Serverless
8 9 (3.75%) Amazon S3
9 8 (3.33%) Azure DevOps
9 8 (3.33%) SaaS
10 6 (2.50%) AWS Lambda
10 6 (2.50%) Azure Machine Learning
11 5 (2.08%) AWS CloudFormation
11 5 (2.08%) GitHub
12 4 (1.67%) Azure AKS
12 4 (1.67%) Azure Synapse Analytics
12 4 (1.67%) dbt
12 4 (1.67%) GitHub Actions
13 3 (1.25%) Azure Cosmos DB
13 3 (1.25%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 6 (2.50%) Firewall
2 5 (2.08%) DNS
2 5 (2.08%) TCP/IP
2 5 (2.08%) VPN
3 3 (1.25%) LAN
3 3 (1.25%) WAN
4 1 (0.42%) 5G
4 1 (0.42%) Internet
4 1 (0.42%) Intranet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 78 (32.50%) Data Warehouse
2 46 (19.17%) Power BI
3 29 (12.08%) Data Lake
4 26 (10.83%) Big Data
5 25 (10.42%) Tableau
6 21 (8.75%) Metadata
7 17 (7.08%) Relational Database
8 15 (6.25%) NoSQL
9 13 (5.42%) Data Mining
9 13 (5.42%) PostgreSQL
10 11 (4.58%) Hadoop
10 11 (4.58%) RDBMS
11 10 (4.17%) Amazon Redshift
11 10 (4.17%) Data Vault
11 10 (4.17%) Delta Lake
11 10 (4.17%) SQL Server
12 9 (3.75%) Amazon Athena
13 8 (3.33%) Amazon RDS
13 8 (3.33%) BigQuery
14 6 (2.50%) SAP Data Services
Development Applications
1 16 (6.67%) ERwin
2 9 (3.75%) Jenkins
3 5 (2.08%) ER Studio
3 5 (2.08%) JIRA
4 4 (1.67%) MLflow
5 3 (1.25%) GitLab
5 3 (1.25%) Maven
6 1 (0.42%) Git
6 1 (0.42%) LSMW
6 1 (0.42%) PowerDesigner
6 1 (0.42%) SonarQube
General
1 59 (24.58%) Social Skills
2 56 (23.33%) Finance
3 35 (14.58%) Analytical Skills
4 18 (7.50%) Public Sector
5 12 (5.00%) Banking
5 12 (5.00%) Marketing
6 11 (4.58%) Presentation Skills
7 9 (3.75%) Influencing Skills
8 7 (2.92%) Financial Institution
8 7 (2.92%) Organisational Skills
8 7 (2.92%) Pharmaceutical
9 6 (2.50%) Front Office
9 6 (2.50%) Investment Banking
9 6 (2.50%) Retail
10 5 (2.08%) Back Office
10 5 (2.08%) Local Government
10 5 (2.08%) Military
11 3 (1.25%) Automotive
11 3 (1.25%) Manufacturing
11 3 (1.25%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 71 (29.58%) Architect
2 58 (24.17%) Data Architect
3 34 (14.17%) Lead
4 30 (12.50%) Senior
5 29 (12.08%) Analyst
6 26 (10.83%) Data Engineer
7 19 (7.92%) Data Analyst
8 14 (5.83%) Data Modeller
9 12 (5.00%) Data Manager
10 10 (4.17%) Consultant
11 9 (3.75%) Head of Analytics
11 9 (3.75%) Senior Data Engineer
12 8 (3.33%) Head of Engineering
12 8 (3.33%) Senior Architect
12 8 (3.33%) Senior Data Architect
13 7 (2.92%) Azure Architect
13 7 (2.92%) Business Analyst
13 7 (2.92%) Enterprise Architect
14 6 (2.50%) Data Consultant
14 6 (2.50%) Project Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (5.42%) Kafka
2 5 (2.08%) Middleware
3 4 (1.67%) D3.js
3 4 (1.67%) PyTorch
3 4 (1.67%) REST
3 4 (1.67%) SOAP
3 4 (1.67%) TensorFlow
4 3 (1.25%) ARM Templates
4 3 (1.25%) Hibernate
4 3 (1.25%) JPA
4 3 (1.25%) Plotly
4 3 (1.25%) PySpark
4 3 (1.25%) React
4 3 (1.25%) scikit-learn
4 3 (1.25%) Spring
4 3 (1.25%) Spring Boot
4 3 (1.25%) Web Services
5 2 (0.83%) Node.js
5 2 (0.83%) RabbitMQ
6 1 (0.42%) SciPy
Miscellaneous
1 20 (8.33%) Legacy Systems
2 17 (7.08%) Data Structures
3 14 (5.83%) Management Information System
4 9 (3.75%) Reference Data
5 7 (2.92%) Enterprise Software
6 5 (2.08%) Data Fabric
6 5 (2.08%) Onboarding
6 5 (2.08%) Public Cloud
7 4 (1.67%) FMCG
7 4 (1.67%) Life Science
8 3 (1.25%) Algorithms
8 3 (1.25%) Cloud Native
8 3 (1.25%) Low-Code
8 3 (1.25%) Self-Motivation
9 2 (0.83%) Analytical Mindset
9 2 (0.83%) Distributed Computing
9 2 (0.83%) Distributed Systems
9 2 (0.83%) Greenfield Project
9 2 (0.83%) IoT
9 2 (0.83%) Renewable Energy
Operating Systems
1 5 (2.08%) Linux
2 4 (1.67%) Windows
3 1 (0.42%) Unix
3 1 (0.42%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 101 (42.08%) Data Governance
2 94 (39.17%) Analytics
3 93 (38.75%) Data Modelling
4 68 (28.33%) Data Architecture
5 59 (24.58%) Business Intelligence
6 51 (21.25%) Decision-Making
7 50 (20.83%) ETL
7 50 (20.83%) Migration
8 47 (19.58%) Data Management
8 47 (19.58%) Problem-Solving
9 46 (19.17%) Data Science
10 40 (16.67%) Visualisation
11 39 (16.25%) Stakeholder Management
12 38 (15.83%) Machine Learning
13 36 (15.00%) Data Analysis
13 36 (15.00%) Stakeholder Engagement
14 35 (14.58%) Data Integration
15 34 (14.17%) Artificial Intelligence
16 33 (13.75%) Data Engineering
17 29 (12.08%) Agile
Programming Languages
1 81 (33.75%) SQL
2 51 (21.25%) Python
3 11 (4.58%) T-SQL
4 8 (3.33%) Java
5 6 (2.50%) R
6 5 (2.08%) JavaScript
7 3 (1.25%) Bicep
8 2 (0.83%) C#
8 2 (0.83%) C++
8 2 (0.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 2 (0.83%) PowerShell
8 2 (0.83%) Scala
8 2 (0.83%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.42%) ABAP
9 1 (0.42%) Apex Code
9 1 (0.42%) C
9 1 (0.42%) MATLAB
9 1 (0.42%) PHP
9 1 (0.42%) PL/SQL
9 1 (0.42%) Rust
Qualifications
1 24 (10.00%) Degree
2 20 (8.33%) Security Cleared
3 14 (5.83%) SC Cleared
4 6 (2.50%) Computer Science Degree
5 3 (1.25%) AWS Certification
5 3 (1.25%) DV Cleared
6 2 (0.83%) Azure Certification
6 2 (0.83%) CISM
6 2 (0.83%) CISSP
6 2 (0.83%) Master's Degree
7 1 (0.42%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
7 1 (0.42%) BPSS Clearance
7 1 (0.42%) CISA
7 1 (0.42%) Microsoft Certification
7 1 (0.42%) Tableau Certification
7 1 (0.42%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 69 (28.75%) Data Quality
2 23 (9.58%) GDPR
3 14 (5.83%) Accessibility
4 10 (4.17%) QA
5 3 (1.25%) ISO/IEC 27001
6 2 (0.83%) Cyber Essentials
6 2 (0.83%) HIPAA
6 2 (0.83%) SOC 2
7 1 (0.42%) California Consumer Privacy Act
7 1 (0.42%) GRC
7 1 (0.42%) NIST
7 1 (0.42%) PMO
System Software
1 13 (5.42%) Docker
2 1 (0.42%) Active Directory
2 1 (0.42%) Virtual Machines
Systems Management
1 16 (6.67%) Terraform
2 10 (4.17%) Kubernetes
3 3 (1.25%) Kubeflow
4 1 (0.42%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
Vendors
1 37 (15.42%) Databricks
2 31 (12.92%) Microsoft
3 21 (8.75%) SAP
4 20 (8.33%) Google
5 13 (5.42%) Salesforce
6 11 (4.58%) Oracle
7 5 (2.08%) Informatica
7 5 (2.08%) Sparx
8 3 (1.25%) Atlassian
9 2 (0.83%) Alteryx
9 2 (0.83%) Ariba
9 2 (0.83%) Foundry
9 2 (0.83%) MuleSoft
9 2 (0.83%) Palantir
9 2 (0.83%) ServiceNow
9 2 (0.83%) Talend
9 2 (0.83%) Teradata
9 2 (0.83%) TSYS
10 1 (0.42%) Guidewire
10 1 (0.42%) Salesforce Marketing Cloud