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 9 June 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
9 Jun 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 339 221 328
Rank change year-on-year -118 +107 +110
Contract jobs citing PKI 180 471 429
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.61% 1.09% 0.77%
As % of the Miscellaneous category 1.80% 3.63% 2.32%
Number of daily rates quoted 143 331 314
10th Percentile £414 £363 £428
25th Percentile £500 £438 £500
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% -4.35% +2.22%
75th Percentile £632 £625 £663
90th Percentile £683 £675 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £575 £550 £564
% change year-on-year +4.55% -2.48% +7.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 4 4
10th Percentile - - £29.10
25th Percentile - - £50.25
Median hourly rate - £23.80 £65.00
Median % change year-on-year - -63.38% -1.52%
75th Percentile - £27.91 £70.25
90th Percentile - £35.32 £77.90
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £38.50 £15.00
% change year-on-year - +156.67% -60.53%

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 10,023 12,991 18,521
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 34.17% 30.00% 33.25%
Number of daily rates quoted 6,266 8,305 12,739
10th Percentile £300 £274 £310
25th Percentile £406 £413 £446
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £538 £550
Median % change year-on-year -2.33% -2.27% -
75th Percentile £650 £660 £678
90th Percentile £775 £800 £800
UK excluding London median daily rate £475 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -5.00% - +2.56%
Number of hourly rates quoted 428 930 612
10th Percentile £15.84 £12.25 £9.80
25th Percentile £19.62 £15.28 £10.63
Median hourly rate £32.95 £35.50 £22.13
Median % change year-on-year -7.20% +60.45% -18.06%
75th Percentile £62.24 £61.30 £60.00
90th Percentile £82.25 £71.31 £74.93
UK excluding London median hourly rate £31.91 £35.00 £22.00
% change year-on-year -8.84% +59.09% +2.33%

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 9 June 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 14 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 9 June 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 -117 166 £575 +4.55% 134
UK excluding London -115 112 £575 +4.55% 106
Work from Home +9 59 £575 -4.96% 74
London +32 50 £585 +8.33% 57
South West -16 44 £585 +6.36% 22
South East -60 33 £575 -4.96% 34
West Midlands -41 20 £438 +16.67% 1
Midlands -51 20 £438 +16.67% 6
North of England +6 7 £492 -14.43% 14
North West +8 6 £492 -18.00% 11
East of England +31 4 £525 -19.23% 6
Scotland -2 4 £535 -10.83% 8
North East -2 1 £350 -18.79% 1
Wales - 1 £458 - 9

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 30 (16.67%) Microsoft Exchange
2 17 (9.44%) Confluence
3 10 (5.56%) Apache
4 9 (5.00%) IIS
4 9 (5.00%) Skype for Business
5 8 (4.44%) Camunda
5 8 (4.44%) SharePoint
6 6 (3.33%) Alfresco
7 2 (1.11%) JBoss
8 1 (0.56%) CMS
8 1 (0.56%) Tomcat
Applications
1 18 (10.00%) Microsoft Office
2 3 (1.67%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 2 (1.11%) Dynamics GP
2 1 (0.56%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 63 (35.00%) AWS
2 52 (28.89%) Azure
3 22 (12.22%) Entra ID
4 19 (10.56%) GCP
5 15 (8.33%) IaaS
5 15 (8.33%) PaaS
6 9 (5.00%) Microsoft 365
6 9 (5.00%) OpenShift
7 8 (4.44%) AWS KMS
7 8 (4.44%) Azure Monitor
7 8 (4.44%) Azure Sentinel
8 7 (3.89%) Azure DevOps
9 6 (3.33%) SaaS
10 5 (2.78%) Amazon EC2
10 5 (2.78%) Cloud Computing
10 5 (2.78%) Serverless
11 3 (1.67%) Azure Key Vault
11 3 (1.67%) Route 53
12 2 (1.11%) Akamai
12 2 (1.11%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 58 (32.22%) DNS
2 42 (23.33%) VPN
3 38 (21.11%) Firewall
4 35 (19.44%) DHCP
5 20 (11.11%) SMTP
6 19 (10.56%) BGP
6 19 (10.56%) SSL
7 18 (10.00%) IPsec
7 18 (10.00%) Network Security
8 17 (9.44%) MPLS
9 14 (7.78%) Skype
9 14 (7.78%) WAN
10 13 (7.22%) Unified Communications
11 9 (5.00%) TCP/IP
12 6 (3.33%) HTTPS
12 6 (3.33%) Kerberos
12 6 (3.33%) NetScaler
12 6 (3.33%) Wireless
13 5 (2.78%) Radio Access Network
14 4 (2.22%) X.509
Database & Business Intelligence
1 18 (10.00%) MongoDB
2 15 (8.33%) MySQL
2 15 (8.33%) PostgreSQL
3 13 (7.22%) Amazon RDS
4 9 (5.00%) Big Data
4 9 (5.00%) Elasticsearch
5 8 (4.44%) Relational Database
6 7 (3.89%) SQL Server
7 5 (2.78%) NoSQL
8 4 (2.22%) GIS
9 3 (1.67%) Redis
10 2 (1.11%) Hadoop
11 1 (0.56%) Azure SQL Database
Development Applications
1 17 (9.44%) JIRA
2 12 (6.67%) GitLab
2 12 (6.67%) JUnit
3 5 (2.78%) Gradle
3 5 (2.78%) Jenkins
3 5 (2.78%) Maven
4 4 (2.22%) Bitbucket
5 3 (1.67%) Git
6 2 (1.11%) MSI
6 2 (1.11%) Robot Framework
6 2 (1.11%) Sonatype Nexus
7 1 (0.56%) Jaeger
7 1 (0.56%) Terragrunt
General
1 45 (25.00%) Social Skills
2 43 (23.89%) Public Sector
3 27 (15.00%) Analytical Skills
4 9 (5.00%) Military
5 5 (2.78%) Telecoms
6 4 (2.22%) Finance
7 3 (1.67%) Aerospace
7 3 (1.67%) Documentation Skills
8 1 (0.56%) Influencing Skills
8 1 (0.56%) Legal
8 1 (0.56%) Manufacturing
8 1 (0.56%) Organisational Skills
8 1 (0.56%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 30 (16.67%) Architect
2 23 (12.78%) Infrastructure Engineer
3 20 (11.11%) Support Engineer
4 19 (10.56%) Developer
4 19 (10.56%) Network Engineer
4 19 (10.56%) Senior
5 12 (6.67%) 3rd Line Engineer
6 10 (5.56%) Security Architect
7 9 (5.00%) 2nd Line Engineer
7 9 (5.00%) 2nd Line Support
7 9 (5.00%) 2nd Line Support Engineer
7 9 (5.00%) 3rd Line Support
7 9 (5.00%) 3rd Line Support Engineer
8 8 (4.44%) ForgeRock Engineer
8 8 (4.44%) Full-Stack Developer
8 8 (4.44%) Wintel Engineer
9 7 (3.89%) 2nd Line Network Engineer
9 7 (3.89%) DevOps Engineer
9 7 (3.89%) Network Support
9 7 (3.89%) Network Support Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 15 (8.33%) HTML
1 15 (8.33%) Spring Boot
2 14 (7.78%) OAuth
2 14 (7.78%) Spring
3 13 (7.22%) OpenID
4 11 (6.11%) Kafka
5 10 (5.56%) AngularJS
5 10 (5.56%) OAuth2
5 10 (5.56%) XML
6 9 (5.00%) .NET
6 9 (5.00%) Keycloak
6 9 (5.00%) SOAP
7 7 (3.89%) Hibernate
7 7 (3.89%) JPA
7 7 (3.89%) NETCONF
7 7 (3.89%) REST
7 7 (3.89%) RESTCONF
7 7 (3.89%) SAML
8 6 (3.33%) JDBC
8 6 (3.33%) LDAP
Miscellaneous
1 19 (10.56%) Clustering
1 19 (10.56%) Data Centre
2 8 (4.44%) Security Posture
3 7 (3.89%) Algorithms
3 7 (3.89%) Management Information System
3 7 (3.89%) Taxonomies
4 6 (3.33%) Cyber Threat
5 5 (2.78%) Replication
6 4 (2.22%) Self-Motivation
7 3 (1.67%) Cloud Native
8 2 (1.11%) Cyber Defence
8 2 (1.11%) Enterprise Software
8 2 (1.11%) Hybrid Cloud
8 2 (1.11%) N-Tier
8 2 (1.11%) Video Conferencing
9 1 (0.56%) Blackberry
9 1 (0.56%) Cloud Security Posture
9 1 (0.56%) Cyberattack
9 1 (0.56%) Private Cloud
9 1 (0.56%) Security Operations Centre
Operating Systems
1 72 (40.00%) Windows
2 58 (32.22%) Windows Server
3 28 (15.56%) Linux
4 16 (8.89%) Windows Server 2012
5 15 (8.33%) Windows 10
6 13 (7.22%) Windows Server 2003
7 12 (6.67%) Windows Server 2016
8 8 (4.44%) Windows Server 2019
9 3 (1.67%) Oracle Linux
9 3 (1.67%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
9 3 (1.67%) Solaris
9 3 (1.67%) VMS
10 2 (1.11%) CentOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 38 (21.11%) Agile
1 38 (21.11%) DevOps
2 28 (15.56%) Problem-Solving
3 27 (15.00%) Infrastructure Engineering
4 26 (14.44%) Identity Access Management
5 25 (13.89%) Microservices
6 23 (12.78%) CI/CD
6 23 (12.78%) Mentoring
7 20 (11.11%) Service Management
8 19 (10.56%) Cloud Security
8 19 (10.56%) Cybersecurity
9 18 (10.00%) Critical Thinking
9 18 (10.00%) ITIL
10 17 (9.44%) High Availability
11 16 (8.89%) System Testing
12 15 (8.33%) Cryptography
12 15 (8.33%) Key Management
12 15 (8.33%) Threat Modelling
13 14 (7.78%) DevSecOps
13 14 (7.78%) TDD
Programming Languages
1 52 (28.89%) PowerShell
2 29 (16.11%) Java
2 29 (16.11%) Python
3 22 (12.22%) SQL
4 14 (7.78%) JavaScript
5 8 (4.44%) Shell Script
6 5 (2.78%) C#
7 3 (1.67%) VB
8 2 (1.11%) Bash
8 2 (1.11%) Kusto Query Language
8 2 (1.11%) PHP
8 2 (1.11%) Ruby
8 2 (1.11%) T-SQL
8 2 (1.11%) VBScript
9 1 (0.56%) Bicep
Qualifications
1 122 (67.78%) Security Cleared
2 79 (43.89%) SC Cleared
3 48 (26.67%) DV Cleared
4 40 (22.22%) Degree
5 19 (10.56%) Cisco Certification
5 19 (10.56%) Microsoft Certification
6 11 (6.11%) MCSE
7 10 (5.56%) CCNP
8 8 (4.44%) AWS Certification
9 6 (3.33%) CISM
9 6 (3.33%) CISSP
9 6 (3.33%) MCSA
10 5 (2.78%) Azure Certification
10 5 (2.78%) CCIE
10 5 (2.78%) CRISC
11 4 (2.22%) (ISC)2 CCSP
11 4 (2.22%) GIAC
11 4 (2.22%) Master's Degree
11 4 (2.22%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
12 3 (1.67%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 12 (6.67%) NIST
2 11 (6.11%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 7 (3.89%) GDPR
3 7 (3.89%) NCSC
4 5 (2.78%) SOC 2
5 3 (1.67%) PCI DSS
6 2 (1.11%) Disclosure Scotland
6 2 (1.11%) FIPS 140-2
6 2 (1.11%) Government Security Classifications
6 2 (1.11%) HMG Security Policy Framework
6 2 (1.11%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
6 2 (1.11%) NIST 800
6 2 (1.11%) QA
7 1 (0.56%) Cyber Essentials
7 1 (0.56%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
7 1 (0.56%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.56%) JSP 440
7 1 (0.56%) SLA
System Software
1 75 (41.67%) Active Directory
2 36 (20.00%) VMware Infrastructure
3 30 (16.67%) Docker
4 26 (14.44%) Hyper-V
5 23 (12.78%) VMware ESXi
6 10 (5.56%) BitLocker
6 10 (5.56%) Microsoft App-V
6 10 (5.56%) Terminal Services
7 9 (5.00%) vSphere
8 6 (3.33%) Microsoft Virtual Server
8 6 (3.33%) Virtual Servers
8 6 (3.33%) XenApp
8 6 (3.33%) XenDesktop
9 5 (2.78%) Virtual Machines
10 4 (2.22%) Apache ZooKeeper
11 2 (1.11%) Virtual Desktop
11 2 (1.11%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 33 (18.33%) Kubernetes
2 30 (16.67%) Ansible
3 23 (12.78%) Terraform
4 18 (10.00%) WSUS
5 15 (8.33%) Single Sign-On
6 14 (7.78%) Microsoft Intune
7 13 (7.22%) vCenter Server
8 11 (6.11%) Puppet
9 10 (5.56%) vMotion
10 9 (5.00%) Nagios
10 9 (5.00%) SCCM
11 7 (3.89%) Microsoft Clustering
12 6 (3.33%) OPNET
13 5 (2.78%) SCOM
14 4 (2.22%) Active Directory Federation Services
14 4 (2.22%) Istio
15 3 (1.67%) Kibana
15 3 (1.67%) Progress Chef
16 2 (1.11%) CASB
16 2 (1.11%) WMI
Vendors
1 79 (43.89%) Microsoft
2 50 (27.78%) VMware
3 17 (9.44%) Google
4 16 (8.89%) Citrix
4 16 (8.89%) HP
5 15 (8.33%) Cisco
6 14 (7.78%) Atlassian
7 10 (5.56%) ForgeRock
7 10 (5.56%) Juniper
7 10 (5.56%) Symantec
8 7 (3.89%) Dell
8 7 (3.89%) Ping Identity
9 6 (3.33%) Palo Alto
10 5 (2.78%) Ericsson
10 5 (2.78%) Fortinet
10 5 (2.78%) Oracle
10 5 (2.78%) Thales
10 5 (2.78%) Veeam
11 4 (2.22%) Red Hat
12 3 (1.67%) Zscaler