Job Vacancy Trend Daily Rate Trend Daily Rate Histogram Hourly Rate Trend Hourly Rate Histogram Job Locations Skill Sets
Period
to 26 January 2021

The following table provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies with a requirement for Test Automation skills. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that have cited Test Automation over the 6 months to 26 January 2021 with a comparison to the same period in the previous 2 years.

Note that daily and hourly rates are treated separately in these statistics. When calculating contractor rate percentiles, daily rates are never derived from quoted hourly rates or vice versa.

Automated Testing
UK
6 months to
26 Jan 2021		 Same period 2020 Same period 2019
Rank 36 36 24
Rank change year-on-year 0 -12 +11
Contract jobs citing Test Automation 2,229 3,749 6,988
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 5.22% 5.28% 7.08%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.06% 6.17% 8.09%
Number of daily rates quoted 2,109 2,620 4,832
Median daily rate £475 £463 £475
Median daily rate % change year-on-year +2.70% -2.63% +5.56%
10th Percentile £325 £319 £315
90th Percentile £638 £621 £600
UK excluding London median daily rate £450 £450 £425
% change year-on-year - +5.88% +6.25%
Number of hourly rates quoted 64 46 49
Median hourly rate £41.00 £44.50 £42.50
Median hourly rate % change year-on-year -7.87% +4.71% +4.94%
10th Percentile £26.08 £21.25 £19.69
90th Percentile £62.78 £69.38 £49.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £43.75 £40.00 £42.50
% change year-on-year +9.38% -5.88% -0.58%

Test Automation is in the Processes and Methodologies category. The following table is for comparison with the above and provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills.

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK
Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 36,799 60,737 86,430
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.26% 85.50% 87.53%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,930 40,627 58,157
Median daily rate £475 £475 £475
10th Percentile £300 £281 £300
90th Percentile £650 £650 £650
UK excluding London median daily rate £425 £430 £425
% change year-on-year -1.16% +1.18% +4.94%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,199 1,853 2,108
Median hourly rate £27.50 £21.00 £22.00
Median hourly rate % change year-on-year +30.95% -4.55% +1.27%
10th Percentile £12.02 £12.00 £11.25
90th Percentile £60.00 £53.00 £50.00
Median hourly rate £24.40 £19.71 £21.50
% change year-on-year +23.80% -8.33% -

Test Automation
Job Vacancy Trend

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

Job vacancy trend for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

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

Daily rate trend for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Test Automation over the 6 months to 26 January 2021.

Daily rate histogram for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

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

Hourly rate trend for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Test Automation over the 6 months to 26 January 2021.

Hourly rate histogram for Test Automation in the UK

Test Automation
Top 17 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Test Automation within the UK over the 6 months to 26 January 2021. 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
Job
Vacancies
England +2 1,806 £465 -2.11% 744
London +5 1,033 £500 -0.05% 320
UK excluding London -2 836 £450 - 502
Work from Home +6 623 £485 -3.00% 165
North of England +9 256 £450 +4.65% 162
South East -11 190 £460 -3.16% 95
Yorkshire +12 131 £450 -5.26% 66
Midlands -1 115 £382 -7.39% 65
Scotland -5 105 £425 - 46
North West +29 91 £440 +3.53% 81
South West -20 83 £450 +5.88% 45
West Midlands +6 73 £368 -14.78% 37
East of England +2 68 £425 -5.56% 54
North East -10 34 £450 +5.88% 15
East Midlands -2 33 £471 +14.24% 28
Wales -14 16 £425 +13.33% 16
Northern Ireland +6 5 £427 -0.93% 16

For the 6 months to 26 January 2021, IT contractor jobs citing Test Automation also mentioned the following skills in order of popularity. The figures indicate the absolute number co-occurrences and as a proportion of all contract job ads with a requirement for Test Automation.

1 1,229 (55.14%) Agile Software Development
2 865 (38.81%) Java
3 741 (33.24%) DevOps
4 530 (23.78%) TDD
5 528 (23.69%) Azure
6 511 (22.93%) Jenkins
7 508 (22.79%) Python
8 499 (22.39%) Selenium
9 485 (21.76%) Git (software)
10 470 (21.09%) Scrum
11 468 (21.00%) JavaScript
12 447 (20.05%) AWS
13 446 (20.01%) BDD
14 430 (19.29%) SQL
15 416 (18.66%) JIRA
16 399 (17.90%) Continuous Integration
17 382 (17.14%) Microservices
18 368 (16.51%) Docker
19 362 (16.24%) QA
20 357 (16.02%) Finance
21 333 (14.94%) Security Cleared
22 328 (14.72%) Cucumber
23 318 (14.27%) Linux
24 309 (13.86%) Kubernetes
25 307 (13.77%) C#
26 296 (13.28%) REST
27 271 (12.16%) SC Cleared
28 268 (12.02%) .NET
29 265 (11.89%) Node.js
30 248 (11.13%) Software Engineering

Test Automation
Co-occurring IT Skills by Category

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

Application Platforms
1 208 (9.33%) Confluence
2 59 (2.65%) Elasticsearch
3 52 (2.33%) Apache
4 49 (2.20%) Mule
5 42 (1.88%) Apache Spark
6 41 (1.84%) Cloud Foundry
7 37 (1.66%) WebLogic
8 22 (0.99%) CMS
9 20 (0.90%) JBoss
10 19 (0.85%) WebSphere
11 18 (0.81%) Apache Airflow
11 18 (0.81%) SharePoint
12 15 (0.67%) Tomcat
13 14 (0.63%) Red Hat Fuse
14 11 (0.49%) IBM Domino
15 10 (0.45%) Adobe Experience Manager
16 9 (0.40%) Anypoint
16 9 (0.40%) Drupal
16 9 (0.40%) MQSeries
17 7 (0.31%) WordPress
Applications
1 32 (1.44%) Microsoft Excel
2 13 (0.58%) Microsoft Office
3 7 (0.31%) MS Visio
4 6 (0.27%) Microsoft Project
5 4 (0.18%) Chatbot
6 2 (0.090%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 2 (0.090%) Sketch
7 1 (0.045%) Figma
7 1 (0.045%) Spreadsheet
7 1 (0.045%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 13 (0.58%) SAP FI-CA
2 11 (0.49%) BASE24
2 11 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
3 10 (0.45%) SAP PSCD
4 9 (0.40%) ION MarketView
4 9 (0.40%) SunGard Martini
5 8 (0.36%) SAP S/4HANA
6 6 (0.27%) Magento
7 5 (0.22%) Salesforce.com CRM
7 5 (0.22%) Sparx Enterprise Architect
8 4 (0.18%) SAP Hybris
9 3 (0.13%) Dynamics NAV
9 3 (0.13%) Oracle Applications
9 3 (0.13%) Payment Gateway
10 2 (0.090%) Dynamics AX
10 2 (0.090%) Endur
10 2 (0.090%) Loan IQ
10 2 (0.090%) Oracle ERP
10 2 (0.090%) SAP ERP
10 2 (0.090%) Teamcenter
Cloud Services
1 528 (23.69%) Azure
2 447 (20.05%) AWS
3 237 (10.63%) GitHub
4 174 (7.81%) Serverless
5 114 (5.11%) PaaS
6 101 (4.53%) AWS Lambda
7 90 (4.04%) Slack
8 78 (3.50%) Azure Functions
9 66 (2.96%) GCP
10 61 (2.74%) Power Platform
11 57 (2.56%) Logic Apps
12 50 (2.24%) IaaS
13 46 (2.06%) SaaS
14 41 (1.84%) Amazon S3
15 35 (1.57%) Power Automate
15 35 (1.57%) PowerApps
16 33 (1.48%) AWS CloudFormation
17 29 (1.30%) Amazon EC2
17 29 (1.30%) Cloud Computing
18 28 (1.26%) OpenShift
Communications & Networking
1 56 (2.51%) HTTP
2 34 (1.53%) Firewall
3 33 (1.48%) SSL
4 30 (1.35%) TCP/IP
5 24 (1.08%) Wi-Fi
6 22 (0.99%) IPv6
7 20 (0.90%) Wireless
8 18 (0.81%) HTTPS
8 18 (0.81%) Kerberos
9 16 (0.72%) ATM
9 16 (0.72%) Internet
9 16 (0.72%) IPv4
10 14 (0.63%) DNS
10 14 (0.63%) DSL
10 14 (0.63%) UPnP
11 10 (0.45%) 4G
11 10 (0.45%) 802.11
11 10 (0.45%) SSH
11 10 (0.45%) Wireshark
12 9 (0.40%) Multicast
Database & Business Intelligence
1 145 (6.51%) SQL Server
2 108 (4.85%) Big Data
3 97 (4.35%) Relational Database
4 92 (4.13%) NoSQL
5 90 (4.04%) MongoDB
6 80 (3.59%) PostgreSQL
7 71 (3.19%) MySQL
8 67 (3.01%) Oracle Database
9 60 (2.69%) Azure SQL Database
10 56 (2.51%) Data Warehouse
11 48 (2.15%) Hadoop
12 39 (1.75%) RDBMS
13 38 (1.70%) OLTP
14 32 (1.44%) Amazon RDS
15 31 (1.39%) Data Lake
16 27 (1.21%) Apache Hive
16 27 (1.21%) Cosmos DB
17 24 (1.08%) Amazon DynamoDB
17 24 (1.08%) Power BI
18 20 (0.90%) Oracle Database 12c
Development Applications
1 511 (22.93%) Jenkins
2 499 (22.39%) Selenium
3 485 (21.76%) Git (software)
4 416 (18.66%) JIRA
5 328 (14.72%) Cucumber
6 171 (7.67%) Maven
7 142 (6.37%) JMeter
8 128 (5.74%) GitLab
9 126 (5.65%) Postman
10 119 (5.34%) JUnit
11 104 (4.67%) Sonatype Nexus
12 99 (4.44%) SoapUI
13 83 (3.72%) Cypress.io
13 83 (3.72%) REST Assured
14 77 (3.45%) WebDriver
15 74 (3.32%) SpecFlow
16 73 (3.28%) Visual Studio Team System
17 65 (2.92%) Subversion
18 62 (2.78%) Xcode
19 53 (2.38%) Visual Studio
General
1 357 (16.02%) Finance
2 235 (10.54%) Public Sector
3 225 (10.09%) Banking
4 66 (2.96%) Investment Banking
5 63 (2.83%) Front Office
6 40 (1.79%) Marketing
7 34 (1.53%) Retail Banking
8 29 (1.30%) Telecoms
9 19 (0.85%) Automotive
10 16 (0.72%) Law
10 16 (0.72%) Legal
11 15 (0.67%) Financial Institution
11 15 (0.67%) Retail
12 14 (0.63%) Games
13 11 (0.49%) Back Office
13 11 (0.49%) Pharmaceutical
14 9 (0.40%) Electronics
14 9 (0.40%) Manufacturing
15 7 (0.31%) Advertising
15 7 (0.31%) Police
Job Titles
1 722 (32.39%) Developer
2 253 (11.35%) Tester
3 194 (8.70%) DevOps Engineer
3 194 (8.70%) Test Engineer
4 161 (7.22%) Java Developer
5 154 (6.91%) Automation Tester
6 136 (6.10%) Analyst
7 119 (5.34%) Test Automation Engineer
8 111 (4.98%) Test Analyst
9 102 (4.58%) Architect
10 99 (4.44%) Azure Engineer
10 99 (4.44%) Senior Developer
11 92 (4.13%) QA Engineer
12 85 (3.81%) Full Stack Developer
13 79 (3.54%) Software Engineer
14 69 (3.10%) AWS Engineer
15 68 (3.05%) Azure DevOps Engineer
16 63 (2.83%) Azure DevOps
17 60 (2.69%) Automation Engineer
18 58 (2.60%) .NET Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 296 (13.28%) REST
2 268 (12.02%) .NET
3 265 (11.89%) Node.js
4 245 (10.99%) React
5 198 (8.88%) Spring
6 188 (8.43%) HTML
7 184 (8.25%) CSS
7 184 (8.25%) JSON
8 172 (7.72%) Spring Boot
9 169 (7.58%) RESTful
10 165 (7.40%) XML
11 162 (7.27%) Web Services
12 128 (5.74%) SOAP
13 116 (5.20%) Kafka
14 113 (5.07%) AngularJS
15 100 (4.49%) Redux
16 97 (4.35%) HTML5
17 88 (3.95%) Gherkin
18 73 (3.28%) .NET Framework
19 66 (2.96%) WireMock
Miscellaneous
1 174 (7.81%) User Experience
2 149 (6.68%) Mobile App
3 146 (6.55%) Analytical Skills
4 92 (4.13%) Greenfield Project
5 51 (2.29%) Enterprise Software
6 39 (1.75%) Cloud Native
7 38 (1.70%) Self-Motivation
8 36 (1.62%) Foreign Exchange (FX)
9 33 (1.48%) Data Structures
9 33 (1.48%) Derivative
10 32 (1.44%) Public Cloud
11 31 (1.39%) Virtual Team
12 27 (1.21%) Fixed Income
13 26 (1.17%) N-Tier
14 23 (1.03%) NHS
15 22 (0.99%) Embedded Systems
15 22 (0.99%) Equities
16 20 (0.90%) Management Information System
17 19 (0.85%) Algorithms
17 19 (0.85%) DataPower
Operating Systems
1 318 (14.27%) Linux
2 148 (6.64%) Unix
3 144 (6.46%) Windows
4 142 (6.37%) Android
5 141 (6.33%) Apple iOS
6 46 (2.06%) Mac OS X
7 35 (1.57%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8 14 (0.63%) Ubuntu
9 11 (0.49%) OpenWrt
10 10 (0.45%) Windows Server
11 9 (0.40%) Windows 10
12 8 (0.36%) CentOS
13 7 (0.31%) Mac OS
14 5 (0.22%) Debian
15 3 (0.13%) Windows Server 2016
16 2 (0.090%) Android TV
16 2 (0.090%) Solaris
16 2 (0.090%) zOS
17 1 (0.045%) Embedded Linux
17 1 (0.045%) SUSE
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,229 (55.14%) Agile Software Development
2 741 (33.24%) DevOps
3 530 (23.78%) TDD
4 470 (21.09%) Scrum
5 446 (20.01%) BDD
6 399 (17.90%) Continuous Integration
7 382 (17.14%) Microservices
8 248 (11.13%) Software Engineering
9 232 (10.41%) Kanban
10 209 (9.38%) Continuous Delivery
11 193 (8.66%) Problem-Solving
11 193 (8.66%) SDLC
11 193 (8.66%) Test Scripting
12 187 (8.39%) Deployment Automation
13 176 (7.90%) Open Source
14 168 (7.54%) Test Strategy
15 163 (7.31%) Infrastructure as Code
16 157 (7.04%) Unit Testing
17 149 (6.68%) Performance Testing
18 145 (6.51%) Regression Testing
Programming Languages
1 865 (38.81%) Java
2 508 (22.79%) Python
3 468 (21.00%) JavaScript
4 430 (19.29%) SQL
5 307 (13.77%) C#
6 145 (6.51%) Java 8
7 128 (5.74%) Ruby
8 120 (5.38%) Kotlin
9 119 (5.34%) PowerShell
10 107 (4.80%) Bash Shell
11 100 (4.49%) Scala
12 97 (4.35%) Shell Script
13 86 (3.86%) TypeScript
14 76 (3.41%) Apple Swift
15 70 (3.14%) Go
16 55 (2.47%) PL/SQL
17 53 (2.38%) C++
18 50 (2.24%) Perl
19 44 (1.97%) C
20 40 (1.79%) Groovy
Qualifications
1 333 (14.94%) Security Cleared
2 271 (12.16%) SC Cleared
3 108 (4.85%) ISTQB
4 80 (3.59%) Degree
5 79 (3.54%) ISEB
6 59 (2.65%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
7 34 (1.53%) DV Cleared
8 33 (1.48%) BPSS Clearance
9 23 (1.03%) Computer Science Degree
10 8 (0.36%) DBS Check
10 8 (0.36%) ISTQB Advanced Certification
11 6 (0.27%) Cisco Certification
11 6 (0.27%) PhD
12 5 (0.22%) ISEB Practitioner
13 4 (0.18%) AWS Certification
13 4 (0.18%) Master's Degree
14 3 (0.13%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 3 (0.13%) CEH
14 3 (0.13%) CSSLP
14 3 (0.13%) OSCP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 362 (16.24%) QA
2 32 (1.44%) WCAG
3 23 (1.03%) NIST
4 18 (0.81%) Data Quality
5 9 (0.40%) JTAG
6 7 (0.31%) Disclosure Scotland
7 6 (0.27%) GDPR
7 6 (0.27%) ISO 9000
7 6 (0.27%) SLA
8 5 (0.22%) ISO 8583
8 5 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 12207
8 5 (0.22%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 5 (0.22%) NCSC
9 4 (0.18%) ISO/IEC 17025
10 3 (0.13%) PCI DSS
11 2 (0.090%) HL7
11 2 (0.090%) ISO 9001
11 2 (0.090%) MiFID
11 2 (0.090%) Sarbanes-Oxley
11 2 (0.090%) WAI
System Software
1 368 (16.51%) Docker
2 32 (1.44%) Active Directory
3 21 (0.94%) HDFS
4 17 (0.76%) Hyper-V
5 10 (0.45%) Virtual Machines
6 8 (0.36%) Apache ZooKeeper
6 8 (0.36%) Oracle Clusterware
6 8 (0.36%) Oracle RAC
6 8 (0.36%) VMware Infrastructure
7 6 (0.27%) Firmware
8 4 (0.18%) GridGain
8 4 (0.18%) NDS
8 4 (0.18%) NetIQ eDirectory
9 2 (0.090%) KVM
9 2 (0.090%) NFS
9 2 (0.090%) vSphere
10 1 (0.045%) iptables
10 1 (0.045%) Samba
10 1 (0.045%) VMware ESXi
10 1 (0.045%) Xen
Systems Management
1 309 (13.86%) Kubernetes
2 214 (9.60%) Terraform
3 163 (7.31%) Ansible
4 74 (3.32%) Opscode Chef
5 61 (2.74%) Puppet
6 48 (2.15%) Kibana
7 40 (1.79%) Grafana
8 23 (1.03%) HP ALM
8 23 (1.03%) Prometheus
9 21 (0.94%) HP Quality Center
10 16 (0.72%) logstash
10 16 (0.72%) Rancher
11 12 (0.54%) Consul
12 10 (0.45%) Hadoop YARN
12 10 (0.45%) Oozie
12 10 (0.45%) ZABBIX
13 8 (0.36%) Data Guard
13 8 (0.36%) Oracle RMAN
13 8 (0.36%) Salt
14 6 (0.27%) Nagios
Vendors
1 195 (8.75%) Oracle
2 159 (7.13%) Microsoft
3 76 (3.41%) Splunk
4 68 (3.05%) AppDynamics
5 56 (2.51%) Google
6 49 (2.20%) SAP
7 45 (2.02%) MuleSoft
8 39 (1.75%) Databricks
9 30 (1.35%) HP
10 29 (1.30%) Salesforce.com
11 26 (1.17%) IBM
12 25 (1.12%) Red Hat
13 23 (1.03%) Apple
14 21 (0.94%) Atlassian
15 18 (0.81%) webMethods
16 16 (0.72%) Pega
17 15 (0.67%) Cloudera
17 15 (0.67%) ServiceNow
18 14 (0.63%) VMware
19 13 (0.58%) Bloomberg
855 Test Automation job vacancies Nationwide