PKI Contracts

Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI)
UK

The table below looks at the prevalence of the term PKI in contract job vacancies. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited PKI over the 6 months leading up to 30 April 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
30 Apr 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 318 201 310
Rank change year-on-year -117 +109 +135
Contract jobs citing PKI 214 514 496
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.73% 1.18% 0.83%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 2.16% 3.88% 2.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 162 353 372
10th Percentile £408 £363 £425
25th Percentile £492 £455 £495
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £550 £600
Median % change year-on-year - -8.33% +9.09%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £688
90th Percentile £725 £700 £775
UK excluding London median daily rate £565 £550 £575
% change year-on-year +2.73% -4.35% +9.52%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 4 6
10th Percentile - - £33.75
25th Percentile - £23.80 £52.50
Median hourly rate - £31.15 £59.50
Median % change year-on-year - -47.65% +6.25%
75th Percentile - £47.06 £66.00
90th Percentile - £59.33 £74.50
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £50.75 £35.00
% change year-on-year - +45.00% -33.33%

All Generic Skills
UK

PKI falls under the General and Transferable Skills category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring generic IT skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for generic IT skills 9,915 13,252 19,898
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 33.91% 30.40% 33.34%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,331 8,505 13,670
10th Percentile £300 £263 £308
25th Percentile £413 £413 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.42% -2.18% -
75th Percentile £650 £660 £680
90th Percentile £775 £788 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £496 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -0.90% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 394 910 640
10th Percentile £16.46 £12.25 £9.80
25th Percentile £21.00 £15.17 £10.63
Median hourly rate £32.05 £30.00 £22.49
Median % change year-on-year +6.83% +33.42% -18.24%
75th Percentile £63.75 £60.66 £65.00
90th Percentile £82.99 £70.00 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.93 £27.75 £22.00
% change year-on-year +11.46% +26.14% +9.64%

PKI
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for PKI in the UK

PKI
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for PKI in the UK

PKI
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing PKI over the 6 months to 30 April 2025.

Daily rate histogram for PKI in the UK

PKI
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

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

Hourly rate trend for PKI in the UK

PKI
Top 15 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing PKI within the UK over the 6 months to 30 April 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 -121 188 £575 +4.55% 90
UK excluding London -93 132 £565 +2.73% 68
Work from Home +26 71 £545 -9.92% 57
London -4 56 £537 -6.61% 28
South West -13 45 £575 +4.55% 12
South East -54 40 £575 -4.96% 20
West Midlands -46 19 £425 +13.33% 5
Midlands -46 19 £425 +13.33% 5
North of England +28 16 £681 +36.25% 18
Scotland 0 8 £535 -10.92% 2
North West +7 7 £492 -14.43% 16
Yorkshire - 6 £725 - 2
East of England +32 4 £525 -19.23% 7
North East -2 3 £550 +30.02%
Wales - 1 £458 - 2

PKI
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 31 (14.49%) Microsoft Exchange
2 12 (5.61%) nginx
2 12 (5.61%) Traefik
3 10 (4.67%) Confluence
3 10 (4.67%) SharePoint
4 8 (3.74%) IIS
4 8 (3.74%) Skype for Business
5 6 (2.80%) Apache
5 6 (2.80%) Camunda
6 4 (1.87%) Alfresco
7 2 (0.93%) JBoss
8 1 (0.47%) CMS
Applications
1 12 (5.61%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.47%) Microsoft Excel
2 1 (0.47%) Microsoft PowerPoint
Business Applications
1 5 (2.34%) Dynamics GP
2 1 (0.47%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 80 (37.38%) AWS
2 63 (29.44%) Azure
3 44 (20.56%) Entra ID
4 23 (10.75%) IaaS
4 23 (10.75%) PaaS
5 18 (8.41%) GCP
6 16 (7.48%) Microsoft 365
6 16 (7.48%) Virtual Private Cloud
7 14 (6.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
7 14 (6.54%) Amazon ECS
7 14 (6.54%) AWS CloudFormation
7 14 (6.54%) AWS Fargate
8 13 (6.07%) SaaS
9 12 (5.61%) Amazon EC2
10 10 (4.67%) Route 53
11 9 (4.21%) OpenShift
12 8 (3.74%) Azure Monitor
13 6 (2.80%) AWS KMS
13 6 (2.80%) Power Platform
14 5 (2.34%) Azure Sentinel
Communications & Networking
1 85 (39.72%) DNS
2 50 (23.36%) Firewall
3 47 (21.96%) VPN
4 45 (21.03%) DHCP
5 27 (12.62%) SSL
6 26 (12.15%) TCP/IP
6 26 (12.15%) WAN
7 18 (8.41%) Network Security
7 18 (8.41%) SMTP
8 15 (7.01%) BGP
9 14 (6.54%) MPLS
10 13 (6.07%) Kerberos
10 13 (6.07%) Skype
11 12 (5.61%) IPsec
11 12 (5.61%) VSAN
12 11 (5.14%) LAN
13 10 (4.67%) S/MIME
14 6 (2.80%) HTTPS
14 6 (2.80%) NetScaler
14 6 (2.80%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 29 (13.55%) MongoDB
2 13 (6.07%) Amazon RDS
2 13 (6.07%) MySQL
3 11 (5.14%) PostgreSQL
4 9 (4.21%) Big Data
4 9 (4.21%) Elasticsearch
5 7 (3.27%) SQL Server
6 6 (2.80%) Relational Database
7 5 (2.34%) NoSQL
8 4 (1.87%) GIS
9 3 (1.40%) Redis
10 2 (0.93%) Hadoop
11 1 (0.47%) Azure SQL Database
11 1 (0.47%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 23 (10.75%) GitLab
2 19 (8.88%) Jenkins
3 10 (4.67%) JIRA
3 10 (4.67%) JUnit
4 5 (2.34%) Gradle
4 5 (2.34%) Maven
5 4 (1.87%) Bitbucket
6 2 (0.93%) Git
General
1 55 (25.70%) Public Sector
2 50 (23.36%) Social Skills
3 20 (9.35%) Analytical Skills
4 10 (4.67%) Aerospace
5 9 (4.21%) Military
6 6 (2.80%) Telecoms
7 4 (1.87%) Finance
8 2 (0.93%) Documentation Skills
8 2 (0.93%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 2 (0.93%) Manufacturing
8 2 (0.93%) Marketing
8 2 (0.93%) Organisational Skills
9 1 (0.47%) Electronics
9 1 (0.47%) Influencing Skills
9 1 (0.47%) Law
9 1 (0.47%) Legal
9 1 (0.47%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 57 (26.64%) Architect
2 39 (18.22%) Senior
3 22 (10.28%) Infrastructure Engineer
4 21 (9.81%) Support Engineer
5 17 (7.94%) Developer
6 16 (7.48%) DevOps Engineer
6 16 (7.48%) Lead
7 14 (6.54%) Technical Architect
8 13 (6.07%) Senior DevOps
8 13 (6.07%) Solutions Architect
9 12 (5.61%) Network Engineer
10 11 (5.14%) 3rd Line Engineer
11 10 (4.67%) Active Directory Architect
11 10 (4.67%) Senior Architect
11 10 (4.67%) Senior Technical Architect
12 9 (4.21%) 2nd Line Support
12 9 (4.21%) 2nd Line Support Engineer
12 9 (4.21%) 3rd Line Support
12 9 (4.21%) 3rd Line Support Engineer
12 9 (4.21%) Security Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 23 (10.75%) Kafka
2 21 (9.81%) Keycloak
3 18 (8.41%) .NET
4 14 (6.54%) cloud-init
5 13 (6.07%) HTML
5 13 (6.07%) Spring Boot
6 12 (5.61%) Spring
7 11 (5.14%) OAuth
7 11 (5.14%) OpenID
8 9 (4.21%) SOAP
9 8 (3.74%) AngularJS
9 8 (3.74%) OAuth2
9 8 (3.74%) XML
10 6 (2.80%) JDBC
11 5 (2.34%) Apache NiFi
11 5 (2.34%) Hibernate
11 5 (2.34%) JPA
11 5 (2.34%) REST
11 5 (2.34%) SAML
12 4 (1.87%) 802.1X
Miscellaneous
1 28 (13.08%) Data Centre
2 19 (8.88%) Clustering
3 13 (6.07%) Algorithms
3 13 (6.07%) Hybrid Cloud
4 12 (5.61%) Replication
5 10 (4.67%) Security Posture
6 8 (3.74%) Cyber Threat
7 7 (3.27%) Taxonomies
8 5 (2.34%) Management Information System
9 4 (1.87%) Self-Motivation
10 3 (1.40%) Cloud Native
10 3 (1.40%) Public Cloud
11 2 (0.93%) Cyber Defence
11 2 (0.93%) N-Tier
11 2 (0.93%) Video Conferencing
12 1 (0.47%) Blackberry
12 1 (0.47%) CESG
12 1 (0.47%) Data Protection Act
12 1 (0.47%) Private Cloud
12 1 (0.47%) RSA SecurID
Operating Systems
1 83 (38.79%) Windows
2 67 (31.31%) Windows Server
3 40 (18.69%) Linux
4 16 (7.48%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 15 (7.01%) Unix
5 15 (7.01%) Windows 10
6 14 (6.54%) CentOS
6 14 (6.54%) Windows Server 2003
6 14 (6.54%) Windows Server 2012
7 11 (5.14%) Windows Server 2016
8 8 (3.74%) Windows Server 2019
9 3 (1.40%) VMS
10 2 (0.93%) Mac OS
10 2 (0.93%) Oracle Linux
11 1 (0.47%) Android
11 1 (0.47%) Apple iOS
11 1 (0.47%) Solaris
11 1 (0.47%) Windows Server 2008
Processes & Methodologies
1 43 (20.09%) CI/CD
2 41 (19.16%) DevOps
3 36 (16.82%) Agile
4 32 (14.95%) Infrastructure as Code
5 31 (14.49%) Microservices
6 30 (14.02%) Cloud Security
6 30 (14.02%) Problem-Solving
7 29 (13.55%) Infrastructure Engineering
7 29 (13.55%) ITIL
7 29 (13.55%) RBAC
8 26 (12.15%) Migration
9 25 (11.68%) Identity Access Management
9 25 (11.68%) Identity Management
10 24 (11.21%) Continuous Integration
10 24 (11.21%) DevSecOps
11 21 (9.81%) Mentoring
12 20 (9.35%) Cybersecurity
12 20 (9.35%) Key Management
13 19 (8.88%) Observability
14 18 (8.41%) Static Application Security Testing
Programming Languages
1 63 (29.44%) PowerShell
2 38 (17.76%) Python
3 25 (11.68%) Java
4 20 (9.35%) SQL
5 14 (6.54%) Bash
5 14 (6.54%) Go
5 14 (6.54%) JavaScript
6 8 (3.74%) Shell Script
7 5 (2.34%) C#
8 3 (1.40%) VB
9 2 (0.93%) Ruby
9 2 (0.93%) T-SQL
9 2 (0.93%) VBScript
10 1 (0.47%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 142 (66.36%) Security Cleared
2 97 (45.33%) SC Cleared
3 48 (22.43%) DV Cleared
4 44 (20.56%) Degree
5 30 (14.02%) AWS Certification
6 28 (13.08%) Microsoft Certification
7 20 (9.35%) MCSE
8 13 (6.07%) Azure Certification
8 13 (6.07%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
9 12 (5.61%) Cisco Certification
10 9 (4.21%) Computer Science Degree
11 6 (2.80%) CISM
11 6 (2.80%) CISSP
12 5 (2.34%) CCIE
12 5 (2.34%) CRISC
12 5 (2.34%) MCSA
13 4 (1.87%) (ISC)2 CCSP
13 4 (1.87%) CompTIA Security+
13 4 (1.87%) Master's Degree
14 3 (1.40%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 31 (14.49%) NCSC
2 18 (8.41%) NIST
3 11 (5.14%) Cyber Essentials
4 8 (3.74%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 6 (2.80%) GDPR
6 5 (2.34%) Disclosure Scotland
7 3 (1.40%) PCI DSS
8 2 (0.93%) FIPS 140-2
8 2 (0.93%) Government Security Classifications
8 2 (0.93%) HMG Security Policy Framework
8 2 (0.93%) NIST 800
8 2 (0.93%) SLA
8 2 (0.93%) SOC 2
9 1 (0.47%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
9 1 (0.47%) HIPAA
9 1 (0.47%) JSP 440
9 1 (0.47%) PMO
9 1 (0.47%) QA
System Software
1 84 (39.25%) Active Directory
2 38 (17.76%) VMware Infrastructure
3 27 (12.62%) Hyper-V
4 26 (12.15%) Docker
5 18 (8.41%) VMware ESXi
6 13 (6.07%) VMware NSX
7 11 (5.14%) BitLocker
8 10 (4.67%) Microsoft App-V
8 10 (4.67%) Terminal Services
9 9 (4.21%) vSphere
10 6 (2.80%) Microsoft Virtual Server
10 6 (2.80%) Virtual Machines
10 6 (2.80%) Virtual Servers
10 6 (2.80%) XenApp
10 6 (2.80%) XenDesktop
11 4 (1.87%) Apache ZooKeeper
12 3 (1.40%) Virtual Desktop
13 1 (0.47%) Xen
Systems Management
1 43 (20.09%) Kubernetes
2 32 (14.95%) Terraform
3 19 (8.88%) Ansible
3 19 (8.88%) Microsoft Intune
3 19 (8.88%) WSUS
4 18 (8.41%) Istio
5 15 (7.01%) Rancher
5 15 (7.01%) SCCM
6 14 (6.54%) Consul
6 14 (6.54%) Grafana
6 14 (6.54%) Jamf Pro
6 14 (6.54%) linkerd
6 14 (6.54%) Packer
6 14 (6.54%) Prometheus
6 14 (6.54%) vCenter Server
6 14 (6.54%) ZABBIX
7 13 (6.07%) HAProxy
8 12 (5.61%) Single Sign-On
9 11 (5.14%) Puppet
9 11 (5.14%) vMotion
Vendors
1 89 (41.59%) Microsoft
2 49 (22.90%) VMware
3 21 (9.81%) Cisco
4 20 (9.35%) Palo Alto
5 18 (8.41%) Citrix
6 17 (7.94%) Google
6 17 (7.94%) HP
7 15 (7.01%) Okta
8 14 (6.54%) Splunk
9 13 (6.07%) Apple
10 12 (5.61%) ESET
11 11 (5.14%) Juniper
12 10 (4.67%) ForgeRock
12 10 (4.67%) Symantec
13 7 (3.27%) Atlassian
13 7 (3.27%) Dell
13 7 (3.27%) Ping Identity
14 5 (2.34%) Ericsson
14 5 (2.34%) Fortinet
14 5 (2.34%) Veeam