Problem-Solving Job Trends in England

Problem Solving
UK > England

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs advertised in England requiring Problem-Solving skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 10 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 7 4 6
Rank change year-on-year -3 +2 +5
Permanent jobs citing Problem-Solving 8,837 8,291 10,399
As % of all permanent jobs in England 8.86% 19.06% 15.07%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 12.08% 21.51% 18.56%
Number of salaries quoted 6,092 4,645 4,624
10th Percentile £27,750 £26,250 £27,000
25th Percentile £32,750 £31,250 £37,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £47,371 £45,000 £52,500
Median % change year-on-year +5.27% -14.29% -4.55%
75th Percentile £65,000 £65,000 £70,250
90th Percentile £85,000 £85,000 £85,000
UK median annual salary £47,000 £45,000 £51,500
% change year-on-year +4.44% -12.62% -6.36%

All Process & Methodology Skills
England

Problem-Solving falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all permanent job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in England.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 73,131 38,549 56,028
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in England 73.32% 88.64% 81.20%
Number of salaries quoted 52,091 22,224 32,866
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £31,750
25th Percentile £42,000 £37,500 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -4.35% -8.00%
75th Percentile £80,000 £76,250 £77,500
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £95,000
UK median annual salary £60,000 £55,000 £57,500
% change year-on-year +9.09% -4.35% -4.17%

Problem-Solving
Job Vacancy Trend in England

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Problem-Solving relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in England.

Problem-Solving job vacancy trend in England

Problem-Solving
Salary Trend in England

Salary distribution trend for jobs in England citing Problem-Solving.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in England citing Problem-Solving

Problem-Solving
Salary Histogram in England

Salary distribution for jobs citing Problem-Solving in England over the 6 months to 10 September 2026.

Salary histogram for Problem-Solving in England

Problem-Solving
Job Locations in England

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Problem-Solving within the England region over the 6 months to 10 September 2026. 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
Permanent
IT Job Ads
Median Salary
Past 6 Months
Median Salary
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
London -5 2,312 £65,000 - 2,206
North of England -9 1,798 £45,000 +7.14% 917
South East -4 1,716 £42,500 - 1,117
Midlands -7 1,299 £42,500 +11.84% 770
North West -5 938 £45,000 -5.26% 461
South West -4 902 £45,000 +28.57% 559
East of England -2 726 £42,500 +21.43% 424
West Midlands -8 715 £42,500 -3.41% 461
East Midlands -8 582 £41,000 +17.14% 311
Yorkshire -7 572 £42,500 +24.09% 324
North East -2 288 £48,000 +28.00% 150
Problem-Solving
UK

Problem-Solving
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in England by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 515 (5.83%) SharePoint
2 398 (4.50%) Microsoft Exchange
3 108 (1.22%) Confluence
4 60 (0.68%) IIS
5 48 (0.54%) Apache
6 44 (0.50%) CMS
7 39 (0.44%) Apache Spark
8 36 (0.41%) Apache Airflow
9 34 (0.38%) WordPress
10 19 (0.22%) SAS
11 12 (0.14%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.12%) WebLogic
12 11 (0.12%) WebSphere
13 10 (0.11%) nginx
13 10 (0.11%) Oracle Workflow
14 9 (0.10%) Jupyter
14 9 (0.10%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 7 (0.079%) Exchange Server 2013
15 7 (0.079%) OpenEdge
15 7 (0.079%) Tomcat
Applications
1 597 (6.76%) Microsoft Office
2 529 (5.99%) Microsoft Excel
3 105 (1.19%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 55 (0.62%) Spreadsheet
5 51 (0.58%) MS Visio
6 46 (0.52%) Microsoft Project
7 41 (0.46%) AutoCAD
8 26 (0.29%) Simulink
9 25 (0.28%) Revit
10 16 (0.18%) Chatbot
11 11 (0.12%) SOLIDWORKS
12 10 (0.11%) Autodesk Flame
12 10 (0.11%) Baselight
13 9 (0.10%) Navisworks
14 8 (0.091%) Adobe Creative Suite
14 8 (0.091%) EPLAN
14 8 (0.091%) Fusion 360
14 8 (0.091%) Trello
15 6 (0.068%) Adobe Illustrator
16 5 (0.057%) Lightworks
Business Applications
1 91 (1.03%) Dynamics CRM
2 84 (0.95%) SAP S/4HANA
3 79 (0.89%) NetSuite
4 32 (0.36%) Shopify
5 31 (0.35%) Oracle EBS
6 16 (0.18%) Magento
7 15 (0.17%) Oracle Payables
8 14 (0.16%) Dynamics AX
8 14 (0.16%) Elite 3E
8 14 (0.16%) IBM Planning Analytics
8 14 (0.16%) SAP Business One
9 13 (0.15%) Dynamics NAV
10 12 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
10 12 (0.14%) SAP ERP
11 11 (0.12%) Oracle ERP
12 10 (0.11%) JDE EnterpriseOne
12 10 (0.11%) Oracle Applications
12 10 (0.11%) Sage X3
12 10 (0.11%) Workday HCM
13 9 (0.10%) Payment Gateway
Cloud Services
1 1,754 (19.85%) Azure
2 1,374 (15.55%) Microsoft 365
3 1,052 (11.90%) AWS
4 743 (8.41%) Power Platform
5 424 (4.80%) Entra ID
6 384 (4.35%) SaaS
7 353 (3.99%) GCP
8 222 (2.51%) Azure DevOps
9 212 (2.40%) GitHub
10 193 (2.18%) Power Automate
11 191 (2.16%) Dynamics 365
12 188 (2.13%) Serverless
13 164 (1.86%) PowerApps
14 134 (1.52%) OneDrive
15 129 (1.46%) Microsoft Copilot
16 105 (1.19%) Amazon S3
17 98 (1.11%) GitHub Actions
18 88 (1.00%) AWS Lambda
19 85 (0.96%) AWS CloudFormation
20 84 (0.95%) Google Workspace
Communications & Networking
1 519 (5.87%) Firewall
2 483 (5.47%) DNS
3 409 (4.63%) DHCP
4 344 (3.89%) VPN
5 295 (3.34%) TCP/IP
6 224 (2.53%) Wi-Fi
7 201 (2.27%) WAN
8 196 (2.22%) LAN
9 190 (2.15%) Wireless
10 179 (2.03%) VLAN
11 156 (1.77%) Network Security
12 110 (1.24%) VoIP
13 102 (1.15%) Broadband
14 54 (0.61%) Internet
15 40 (0.45%) HTTP
15 40 (0.45%) SAN
16 37 (0.42%) SD-WAN
17 35 (0.40%) BGP
18 34 (0.38%) OSPF
18 34 (0.38%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 585 (6.62%) Power BI
2 425 (4.81%) SQL Server
3 149 (1.69%) Relational Database
4 145 (1.64%) Data Warehouse
5 140 (1.58%) MySQL
6 130 (1.47%) Amazon RDS
7 128 (1.45%) Tableau
8 117 (1.32%) PostgreSQL
9 104 (1.18%) NoSQL
10 95 (1.08%) SQL Server Reporting Services
11 84 (0.95%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 66 (0.75%) Big Data
13 64 (0.72%) Data Lake
14 63 (0.71%) MongoDB
15 62 (0.70%) Azure SQL Database
16 58 (0.66%) Power Query
17 53 (0.60%) Metadata
18 44 (0.50%) DynamoDB
19 41 (0.46%) Electronic Patient Records
20 38 (0.43%) Looker
Development Applications
1 377 (4.27%) Git
2 306 (3.46%) JIRA
3 141 (1.60%) Jenkins
4 104 (1.18%) GitLab
5 41 (0.46%) Selenium
6 40 (0.45%) Eclipse
7 39 (0.44%) Claude Code
8 35 (0.40%) JUnit
9 33 (0.37%) Subversion
10 31 (0.35%) Cucumber
11 24 (0.27%) Cypress.io
11 24 (0.27%) Postman
11 24 (0.27%) Rational DOORS
12 22 (0.25%) Oracle Forms
13 21 (0.24%) Bitbucket
14 20 (0.23%) SonarQube
15 16 (0.18%) Visual Studio
16 15 (0.17%) Chocolatey
16 15 (0.17%) MLflow
17 14 (0.16%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 4,388 (49.65%) Social Skills
2 2,652 (30.01%) Analytical Skills
3 1,746 (19.76%) Finance
4 733 (8.29%) Manufacturing
5 624 (7.06%) Organisational Skills
6 537 (6.08%) Law
7 517 (5.85%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 447 (5.06%) Retail
9 387 (4.38%) Marketing
10 348 (3.94%) Public Sector
11 341 (3.86%) Legal
12 295 (3.34%) Banking
13 264 (2.99%) Electronics
14 247 (2.80%) Aerospace
15 209 (2.37%) Telecoms
16 189 (2.14%) Influencing Skills
17 169 (1.91%) Presentation Skills
18 119 (1.35%) Automotive
19 113 (1.28%) Documentation Skills
20 103 (1.17%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 1,136 (12.86%) Analyst
2 958 (10.84%) Senior
3 818 (9.26%) Developer
4 742 (8.40%) IT Support
5 595 (6.73%) Support Engineer
6 530 (6.00%) Lead
7 429 (4.85%) Consultant
8 406 (4.59%) IT Engineer
9 382 (4.32%) Support Analyst
10 323 (3.66%) Software Engineer
11 312 (3.53%) IT Support Engineer
12 286 (3.24%) Architect
13 271 (3.07%) Technical Support
14 257 (2.91%) Support Technician
15 252 (2.85%) Systems Engineer
16 228 (2.58%) IT Technician
17 223 (2.52%) Technical Engineer
18 209 (2.37%) Administrator
19 201 (2.27%) Technical Support Engineer
20 197 (2.23%) Data Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 387 (4.38%) .NET
2 369 (4.18%) Terraform
3 309 (3.50%) React
4 283 (3.20%) REST
5 265 (3.00%) HTML
6 202 (2.29%) CSS
7 181 (2.05%) RESTful
8 147 (1.66%) Node.js
9 120 (1.36%) Spring
10 118 (1.34%) SOAP
11 106 (1.20%) JSON
12 104 (1.18%) AngularJS
13 102 (1.15%) Web Services
14 98 (1.11%) ASP.NET
15 94 (1.06%) Vue
16 89 (1.01%) Kafka
16 89 (1.01%) XML
17 87 (0.98%) Middleware
18 78 (0.88%) Spring Boot
19 71 (0.80%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 609 (6.89%) Driving Licence
2 608 (6.88%) Onboarding
3 469 (5.31%) Self-Motivation
4 372 (4.21%) Management Information System
5 318 (3.60%) Cloud Native
6 255 (2.89%) Product Ownership
7 193 (2.18%) Data Centre
8 172 (1.95%) Legacy Systems
9 163 (1.84%) Enterprise Software
10 150 (1.70%) Distributed Systems
11 119 (1.35%) Analytical Mindset
12 115 (1.30%) Data Structures
13 113 (1.28%) Robotics
14 112 (1.27%) Security Posture
15 111 (1.26%) Cyber Threat
16 110 (1.24%) AI Agents
17 108 (1.22%) NHS
18 92 (1.04%) Algorithms
18 92 (1.04%) IoT
19 87 (0.98%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 1,332 (15.07%) Windows
2 565 (6.39%) Linux
3 551 (6.24%) Windows Server
4 162 (1.83%) Windows 10
5 111 (1.26%) Mac OS
6 103 (1.17%) Apple iOS
6 103 (1.17%) Windows Server 2016
7 100 (1.13%) Android
8 55 (0.62%) Unix
9 49 (0.55%) Windows Server 2019
10 33 (0.37%) VMS
11 31 (0.35%) Ubuntu
12 28 (0.32%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
13 13 (0.15%) CentOS
13 13 (0.15%) Embedded Linux
14 11 (0.12%) Debian
14 11 (0.12%) Windows Server 2012
15 9 (0.10%) FreeRTOS
15 9 (0.10%) Mac OS X
15 9 (0.10%) Rocky
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,226 (25.19%) Continuous Improvement
2 1,409 (15.94%) Agile
3 1,386 (15.68%) Customer Service
4 1,152 (13.04%) AI
5 1,053 (11.92%) Decision-Making
6 1,025 (11.60%) Stakeholder Management
7 942 (10.66%) Mentoring
8 924 (10.46%) CI/CD
9 811 (9.18%) Analytics
10 805 (9.11%) Software Engineering
11 763 (8.63%) DevOps
12 718 (8.12%) Cybersecurity
13 708 (8.01%) Project Delivery
14 683 (7.73%) Roadmaps
15 677 (7.66%) ITIL
16 659 (7.46%) Business Intelligence
17 647 (7.32%) Project Management
18 627 (7.10%) Computer Science
19 609 (6.89%) Stakeholder Engagement
20 598 (6.77%) Collaborative Working
Programming Languages
1 1,350 (15.28%) SQL
2 1,196 (13.53%) Python
3 583 (6.60%) JavaScript
4 499 (5.65%) C#
5 448 (5.07%) Java
6 389 (4.40%) PowerShell
7 263 (2.98%) TypeScript
8 243 (2.75%) C++
9 169 (1.91%) Bash
10 101 (1.14%) C
11 85 (0.96%) PHP
12 78 (0.88%) Go
13 76 (0.86%) T-SQL
14 75 (0.85%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 48 (0.54%) Rust
15 48 (0.54%) Shell Script
16 47 (0.53%) Perl
17 45 (0.51%) PL/SQL
17 45 (0.51%) R
17 45 (0.51%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,555 (17.60%) Degree
2 821 (9.29%) Security Cleared
3 546 (6.18%) SC Cleared
4 326 (3.69%) Computer Science Degree
5 249 (2.82%) DBS Check
6 208 (2.35%) Microsoft Certification
7 197 (2.23%) DV Cleared
8 178 (2.01%) Azure Certification
9 158 (1.79%) HNC
10 148 (1.67%) Cisco Certification
11 146 (1.65%) BPSS Clearance
11 146 (1.65%) CISSP
12 142 (1.61%) HND
13 140 (1.58%) Master's Degree
14 106 (1.20%) PMI Certification
15 86 (0.97%) CISM
16 83 (0.94%) PMP
17 82 (0.93%) CCNA
18 78 (0.88%) AWS Certification
19 77 (0.87%) CCNP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 510 (5.77%) QA
2 442 (5.00%) Data Quality
3 372 (4.21%) GDPR
4 252 (2.85%) Accessibility
5 233 (2.64%) SLA
6 205 (2.32%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 192 (2.17%) Cyber Essentials
8 156 (1.77%) NIST
9 134 (1.52%) PCI DSS
10 66 (0.75%) PMO
11 53 (0.60%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
12 40 (0.45%) GRC
13 38 (0.43%) ISO 9001
14 27 (0.31%) NCSC
15 25 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 24 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
17 23 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
18 20 (0.23%) COBIT
18 20 (0.23%) DO-254
19 18 (0.20%) WCAG
System Software
1 885 (10.01%) Active Directory
2 366 (4.14%) Docker
3 282 (3.19%) Hyper-V
4 261 (2.95%) VMware Infrastructure
5 65 (0.74%) Firmware
6 63 (0.71%) Terminal Server
7 51 (0.58%) Virtual Desktop
8 47 (0.53%) Virtual Machines
9 35 (0.40%) vSphere
10 23 (0.26%) Embedded Firmware
11 19 (0.22%) VMware ESXi
12 12 (0.14%) KVM
13 10 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
14 9 (0.10%) GPFS
14 9 (0.10%) StorNext
15 6 (0.068%) IAG
16 5 (0.057%) ClearTrust
16 5 (0.057%) Slurm Workload Manager
16 5 (0.057%) Squid
16 5 (0.057%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 329 (3.72%) Kubernetes
2 295 (3.34%) Microsoft Intune
3 151 (1.71%) Ansible
4 93 (1.05%) Grafana
5 72 (0.81%) SCCM
6 69 (0.78%) Single Sign-On
7 48 (0.54%) Prometheus
8 28 (0.32%) Jamf Pro
9 26 (0.29%) FortiGate
10 22 (0.25%) BMC PATROL
11 19 (0.22%) Puppet
12 18 (0.20%) Nagios
13 17 (0.19%) Argo
14 15 (0.17%) Kibana
15 14 (0.16%) Functional Safety
16 12 (0.14%) logstash
17 11 (0.12%) Nmap
17 11 (0.12%) Proxmox
17 11 (0.12%) vCenter Server
18 10 (0.11%) Podman
Vendors
1 2,606 (29.49%) Microsoft
2 383 (4.33%) VMware
3 286 (3.24%) SAP
4 262 (2.96%) Google
5 249 (2.82%) Oracle
6 179 (2.03%) ServiceNow
7 174 (1.97%) Cisco
8 172 (1.95%) Salesforce
9 135 (1.53%) Databricks
10 127 (1.44%) Veeam
11 119 (1.35%) Splunk
12 111 (1.26%) Sage
13 99 (1.12%) SolarWinds
14 80 (0.91%) Apple
15 72 (0.81%) Fortinet
16 71 (0.80%) Tanium
17 66 (0.75%) Workday
18 65 (0.74%) HubSpot
19 64 (0.72%) Nimble Storage
20 63 (0.71%) Brocade