SSL Contract Job Trends

Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs requiring SSL skills. It covers vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 20 September 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
20 Sep 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 365 412 409
Rank change year-on-year +47 -3 +65
Contract jobs citing SSL 201 146 239
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.61% 0.38% 0.48%
As % of the Communications & Networking category 5.30% 3.19% 3.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 125 84 153
10th Percentile £358 £354 £350
25th Percentile £402 £474 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £575 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year +4.55% +4.76% -4.55%
75th Percentile £650 £653 £627
90th Percentile £700 £750 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £470 £525 £486
% change year-on-year -10.48% +8.02% -2.80%
Number of hourly rates quoted 8 2 12
10th Percentile - £37.70 £55.19
25th Percentile £45.00 £39.13 -
Median hourly rate £65.00 £43.00 £65.98
Median % change year-on-year +51.16% -34.83% +19.96%
75th Percentile £82.26 £46.63 £67.75
90th Percentile £85.00 £47.90 £75.39
UK excluding London median hourly rate £65.00 £43.00 £65.98
% change year-on-year +51.16% -34.83% +14.75%

All Communications and Computer Networking Skills
UK

SSL falls under the Communications and Computer Networking category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring communications or computer networking skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for communications or computer networking skills 3,795 4,582 6,637
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 11.53% 11.89% 13.28%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,356 2,663 4,222
10th Percentile £225 £225 £228
25th Percentile £363 £375 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% - -
75th Percentile £588 £608 £613
90th Percentile £680 £688 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £500 £455
% change year-on-year -10.00% +9.89% +1.11%
Number of hourly rates quoted 200 250 309
10th Percentile £15.50 £14.16 £16.77
25th Percentile £24.75 £21.37 £22.75
Median hourly rate £42.50 £50.50 £56.49
Median % change year-on-year -15.84% -10.60% +37.73%
75th Percentile £63.75 £65.00 £67.50
90th Percentile £73.20 £75.00 £75.67
UK excluding London median hourly rate £42.50 £57.35 £57.50
% change year-on-year -25.89% -0.26% +27.78%

SSL
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for SSL in the UK

SSL
Daily Rate Trend

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSL.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSL

SSL
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing SSL over the 6 months to 20 September 2025.

Daily rate histogram for SSL in the UK

SSL
Hourly Rate Trend

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSL.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing SSL

SSL
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing SSL over the 6 months to 20 September 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for SSL in the UK

SSL
Top 16 Contract Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing SSL within the UK over the 6 months to 20 September 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 +78 185 £575 - 58
London +46 93 £600 - 17
UK excluding London +25 90 £470 -10.48% 44
Work from Home +34 62 £575 +4.55% 25
Midlands +4 29 £378 - 10
North of England -20 27 £535 -2.73% 13
West Midlands +18 25 £380 - 8
North West -9 16 £604 +94.68% 10
East of England +12 15 £603 +39.31% 11
South East +7 15 £375 -31.82% 10
Yorkshire -15 9 £500 -20.00% 3
Scotland -7 5 £525 - 1
South West +23 4 £571 +10.07% 1
East Midlands -6 4 £358 - 2
North East -2 2 £535 -2.73% 1
Wales +3 1 £500 -9.09%

SSL
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 21 (10.45%) Confluence
2 6 (2.99%) Apache
3 4 (1.99%) JBoss
4 3 (1.49%) Oracle Application Server
4 3 (1.49%) WebSphere
4 3 (1.49%) WebSphere Application Server
5 2 (1.00%) Apache Airflow
5 2 (1.00%) Apache Spark
5 2 (1.00%) Microsoft Exchange
5 2 (1.00%) Oracle HTTP Server
5 2 (1.00%) Oracle Service Bus
5 2 (1.00%) Oracle SOA Suite
5 2 (1.00%) Tomcat
5 2 (1.00%) WebLogic
6 1 (0.50%) Anypoint
6 1 (0.50%) CMS
6 1 (0.50%) IIS
6 1 (0.50%) nginx
6 1 (0.50%) SharePoint
6 1 (0.50%) TPMS
Applications
1 2 (1.00%) Microsoft Excel
1 2 (1.00%) Microsoft Office
2 1 (0.50%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 13 (6.47%) Remedy ITSM
2 2 (1.00%) Oracle EBS
Cloud Services
1 61 (30.35%) AWS
2 35 (17.41%) Azure
3 28 (13.93%) Amazon EC2
4 26 (12.94%) Amazon S3
4 26 (12.94%) Virtual Private Cloud
5 23 (11.44%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 19 (9.45%) Amazon ELB
7 14 (6.97%) GCP
8 11 (5.47%) AWS Lambda
8 11 (5.47%) Serverless
9 10 (4.98%) GitHub
10 9 (4.48%) Entra ID
11 8 (3.98%) AWS KMS
12 7 (3.48%) AWS CloudFormation
12 7 (3.48%) Azure DevOps
12 7 (3.48%) Microsoft 365
13 5 (2.49%) Amazon ECS
13 5 (2.49%) GitHub Actions
13 5 (2.49%) IaaS
13 5 (2.49%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 92 (45.77%) Firewall
2 89 (44.28%) DNS
3 74 (36.82%) TCP/IP
4 72 (35.82%) VPN
5 65 (32.34%) Network Security
6 48 (23.88%) HTTP
7 27 (13.43%) BGP
8 24 (11.94%) IPsec
8 24 (11.94%) OSPF
9 23 (11.44%) VLAN
9 23 (11.44%) Wireless
10 22 (10.95%) HTTPS
11 21 (10.45%) DHCP
11 21 (10.45%) WAN
12 15 (7.46%) FTP
13 14 (6.97%) DMVPN
13 14 (6.97%) SMTP
14 11 (5.47%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
15 10 (4.98%) Wireshark
16 9 (4.48%) Cisco IPT
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (3.48%) Apache Cassandra
1 7 (3.48%) SQL Server
2 5 (2.49%) PostgreSQL
2 5 (2.49%) Relational Database
3 3 (1.49%) Amazon RDS
3 3 (1.49%) DynamoDB
3 3 (1.49%) Oracle Database
4 2 (1.00%) Big Data
4 2 (1.00%) Delta Lake
4 2 (1.00%) Hadoop
4 2 (1.00%) NoSQL
4 2 (1.00%) Parquet
4 2 (1.00%) RDBMS
5 1 (0.50%) Mixpanel
5 1 (0.50%) Power BI
Development Applications
1 37 (18.41%) Jenkins
2 35 (17.41%) Git
3 23 (11.44%) JIRA
4 17 (8.46%) GitLab
5 5 (2.49%) Fiddler
5 5 (2.49%) SonarQube
6 4 (1.99%) Robot Framework
7 3 (1.49%) Log4j
8 2 (1.00%) MLflow
8 2 (1.00%) Poetry
8 2 (1.00%) PyCharm
8 2 (1.00%) Visual Studio Code
9 1 (0.50%) Bitbucket
9 1 (0.50%) Crashlytics
9 1 (0.50%) fastlane
9 1 (0.50%) JUnit
9 1 (0.50%) Postman
9 1 (0.50%) Sonatype Nexus
9 1 (0.50%) XCUITest
General
1 53 (26.37%) Social Skills
2 29 (14.43%) Analytical Skills
3 27 (13.43%) Finance
4 22 (10.95%) Public Sector
5 13 (6.47%) Telecoms
6 12 (5.97%) Banking
7 7 (3.48%) Investment Banking
8 5 (2.49%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (2.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 5 (2.49%) Military
9 4 (1.99%) Financial Institution
10 3 (1.49%) Organisational Skills
11 2 (1.00%) Advertising
11 2 (1.00%) Aerospace
11 2 (1.00%) Law
12 1 (0.50%) Italian Language
12 1 (0.50%) Police
12 1 (0.50%) Polish Language
12 1 (0.50%) Presentation Skills
12 1 (0.50%) Spanish Language
Job Titles
1 33 (16.42%) Senior
2 30 (14.93%) Infrastructure Engineer
3 28 (13.93%) Network Engineer
4 24 (11.94%) Architect
5 22 (10.95%) Developer
6 21 (10.45%) Security Engineer
7 15 (7.46%) Analyst
7 15 (7.46%) DevOps Engineer
8 13 (6.47%) Lead
9 12 (5.97%) SOC Analyst
10 11 (5.47%) Network Security Engineer
11 10 (4.98%) Senior DevOps
11 10 (4.98%) Senior DevOps Engineer
11 10 (4.98%) ServiceNow Architect
12 9 (4.48%) Python Engineer
12 9 (4.48%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
13 8 (3.98%) Automation Engineer
13 8 (3.98%) Consultant
13 8 (3.98%) Senior Architect
14 7 (3.48%) Administrator
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 35 (17.41%) REST
2 34 (16.92%) LDAP
3 27 (13.43%) SOAP
4 23 (11.44%) JSON
5 21 (10.45%) SAML
5 21 (10.45%) Web Services
6 20 (9.95%) AngularJS
7 17 (8.46%) OAuth
8 16 (7.96%) HTML
8 16 (7.96%) JDBC
9 13 (6.47%) Apache Camel
9 13 (6.47%) HTML5
9 13 (6.47%) jQuery
9 13 (6.47%) ODBC
9 13 (6.47%) RabbitMQ
10 11 (5.47%) 802.1X
11 9 (4.48%) XML
12 7 (3.48%) Kafka
13 6 (2.99%) RESTful
14 5 (2.49%) Middleware
Miscellaneous
1 26 (12.94%) PKI
2 17 (8.46%) Data Centre
2 17 (8.46%) Management Information System
3 13 (6.47%) Onboarding
4 12 (5.97%) Cyberattack
5 11 (5.47%) Analytical Mindset
6 9 (4.48%) Security Operations Centre
7 8 (3.98%) CSOC
7 8 (3.98%) Cyber Threat
8 7 (3.48%) Algorithms
9 6 (2.99%) Cloud Native
9 6 (2.99%) Security Posture
10 5 (2.49%) Cloud Security Posture
10 5 (2.49%) Distributed Denial-of-Service
10 5 (2.49%) Linux Command Line
10 5 (2.49%) Private Cloud
11 3 (1.49%) State Machine
12 2 (1.00%) Hedge funds
12 2 (1.00%) Hybrid Cloud
12 2 (1.00%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 56 (27.86%) Linux
2 31 (15.42%) Windows
3 22 (10.95%) Unix
4 6 (2.99%) Check Point GAiA
5 5 (2.49%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 5 (2.49%) Windows Server 2003
6 4 (1.99%) Ubuntu
7 3 (1.49%) Windows Server
8 2 (1.00%) Android
8 2 (1.00%) Apple iOS
8 2 (1.00%) CentOS
9 1 (0.50%) Mac OS
9 1 (0.50%) VMS
9 1 (0.50%) Windows 10
9 1 (0.50%) Windows 7
9 1 (0.50%) Windows Server 2012
9 1 (0.50%) Windows Server 2016
9 1 (0.50%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 71 (35.32%) DevOps
2 42 (20.90%) CI/CD
3 36 (17.91%) High Availability
3 36 (17.91%) Problem-Solving
4 32 (15.92%) Agile
4 32 (15.92%) Infrastructure as Code
5 31 (15.42%) Infrastructure Engineering
6 30 (14.93%) Cybersecurity
6 30 (14.93%) Incident Response
6 30 (14.93%) Infrastructure Automation
7 26 (12.94%) SIEM
8 25 (12.44%) Cloud Security
9 21 (10.45%) Root Cause Analysis
10 20 (9.95%) Load Balancing
11 19 (9.45%) Kalman Filter
11 19 (9.45%) Microservices
11 19 (9.45%) Scrum
11 19 (9.45%) Test Automation
12 18 (8.96%) Containerisation
13 17 (8.46%) DevSecOps
Programming Languages
1 62 (30.85%) Python
2 31 (15.42%) Bash
3 23 (11.44%) JavaScript
4 22 (10.95%) PowerShell
5 13 (6.47%) Java
6 12 (5.97%) Perl
7 11 (5.47%) SQL
8 5 (2.49%) PL/SQL
9 4 (1.99%) Shell Script
10 3 (1.49%) ActionScript
10 3 (1.49%) ActionScript 2.0
10 3 (1.49%) C
11 2 (1.00%) C#
11 2 (1.00%) Groovy
11 2 (1.00%) Kotlin
12 1 (0.50%) Bicep
12 1 (0.50%) C++
12 1 (0.50%) Kusto Query Language
12 1 (0.50%) Swift
12 1 (0.50%) VBScript
Qualifications
1 84 (41.79%) Security Cleared
2 68 (33.83%) SC Cleared
3 14 (6.97%) DV Cleared
4 11 (5.47%) Cisco Certification
4 11 (5.47%) Microsoft Certification
5 10 (4.98%) CISSP
6 9 (4.48%) CCNP
6 9 (4.48%) Degree
7 7 (3.48%) CCSA
8 6 (2.99%) AWS Certification
8 6 (2.99%) CCSE
8 6 (2.99%) MCSE
9 5 (2.49%) CompTIA Security+
9 5 (2.49%) MCSA
10 4 (1.99%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
11 3 (1.49%) Azure Certification
11 3 (1.49%) RHCE
11 3 (1.49%) SANS
12 2 (1.00%) CCIE
12 2 (1.00%) CEH
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (4.98%) NIST
2 9 (4.48%) GDPR
3 8 (3.98%) SOC 2
4 5 (2.49%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 4 (1.99%) FIPS 140-2
5 4 (1.99%) PCI DSS
5 4 (1.99%) QA
6 2 (1.00%) Actionable Recommendations
6 2 (1.00%) HIPAA
6 2 (1.00%) NIST 800
6 2 (1.00%) Sarbanes-Oxley
7 1 (0.50%) GLBA
7 1 (0.50%) SLA
System Software
1 38 (18.91%) Docker
2 23 (11.44%) Active Directory
3 8 (3.98%) Firmware
4 5 (2.49%) Hyper-V
4 5 (2.49%) vSphere
5 3 (1.49%) NDS
5 3 (1.49%) NetIQ eDirectory
5 3 (1.49%) VMware ESXi
6 2 (1.00%) VMware Infrastructure
7 1 (0.50%) Embedded Firmware
7 1 (0.50%) Microsoft App-V
7 1 (0.50%) Virtual Machines
7 1 (0.50%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 55 (27.36%) Ansible
2 42 (20.90%) Terraform
3 26 (12.94%) Kubernetes
4 22 (10.95%) Single Sign-On
5 8 (3.98%) FortiGate
5 8 (3.98%) Prometheus
6 7 (3.48%) CASB
7 6 (2.99%) Nessus
8 5 (2.49%) CA Spectrum
8 5 (2.49%) Nagios
8 5 (2.49%) Tivoli
9 4 (1.99%) Grafana
10 3 (1.49%) Microsoft Intune
10 3 (1.49%) SCCM
11 2 (1.00%) McAfee ePO
11 2 (1.00%) Progress Chef
11 2 (1.00%) Puppet
11 2 (1.00%) Rsyslog
11 2 (1.00%) SCOM
11 2 (1.00%) SELinux
Vendors
1 53 (26.37%) F5
2 41 (20.40%) CheckPoint
3 30 (14.93%) Cisco
4 25 (12.44%) Palo Alto
4 25 (12.44%) Splunk
5 22 (10.95%) Microsoft
6 21 (10.45%) Juniper
7 18 (8.96%) Remedy
8 17 (8.46%) Blue Coat
8 17 (8.46%) ServiceNow
9 16 (7.96%) Fortinet
10 14 (6.97%) Oracle
11 13 (6.47%) BMC
11 13 (6.47%) HP
11 13 (6.47%) Ivanti
11 13 (6.47%) SolarWinds
12 11 (5.47%) Zscaler
13 10 (4.98%) IBM
13 10 (4.98%) Meraki
14 9 (4.48%) VMware