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 31 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
31 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 8 4 7
Rank change year-on-year -4 +3 +5
Permanent jobs citing Problem-Solving 7,733 8,319 11,027
As % of all permanent jobs in England 8.47% 19.12% 14.53%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 11.48% 21.31% 17.82%
Number of salaries quoted 5,502 4,756 6,125
10th Percentile £27,750 £26,250 £26,250
25th Percentile £33,000 £32,000 £35,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £47,500 £47,500 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year - -5.00% -9.09%
75th Percentile £67,500 £67,500 £68,750
90th Percentile £85,225 £88,750 £85,000
UK median annual salary £47,500 £47,500 £50,000
% change year-on-year - -5.00% -9.09%

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 67,388 39,043 61,896
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in England 73.82% 89.74% 81.57%
Number of salaries quoted 47,625 22,552 42,071
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,750 £30,000
25th Percentile £41,250 £38,000 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,920 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +7.30% +1.67% -11.29%
75th Percentile £80,000 £77,500 £75,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £100,000 £95,000
UK median annual salary £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
% change year-on-year +9.09% - -8.33%

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 31 July 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 31 July 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 2,134 £67,500 +3.85% 1,475
North of England -9 1,569 £45,000 +5.88% 723
South East -3 1,482 £45,000 +5.88% 889
Midlands -8 1,117 £42,000 +5.00% 512
North West -6 824 £45,000 -2.17% 358
South West -6 750 £44,000 +17.33% 380
West Midlands -10 623 £42,500 -5.56% 301
East of England -5 597 £42,500 +21.43% 321
Yorkshire -9 533 £42,500 +21.43% 259
East Midlands -10 490 £37,500 +5.63% 211
North East -13 212 £50,000 +33.33% 117
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
1 429 (5.55%) SharePoint
2 411 (5.31%) Microsoft Exchange
3 90 (1.16%) Confluence
4 60 (0.78%) CMS
5 51 (0.66%) Apache
6 42 (0.54%) IIS
7 41 (0.53%) Apache Airflow
8 39 (0.50%) Apache Spark
9 33 (0.43%) WordPress
10 19 (0.25%) SAS
11 13 (0.17%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.14%) WebLogic
12 11 (0.14%) WebSphere
13 10 (0.13%) Exchange Server 2013
13 10 (0.13%) nginx
14 9 (0.12%) Oracle SOA Suite
15 8 (0.10%) Exchange Server 2007
15 8 (0.10%) Exchange Server 2010
16 7 (0.091%) Jupyter
16 7 (0.091%) OpenEdge
Applications
1 496 (6.41%) Microsoft Office
2 468 (6.05%) Microsoft Excel
3 86 (1.11%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 47 (0.61%) MS Visio
5 44 (0.57%) Spreadsheet
6 34 (0.44%) Microsoft Project
7 21 (0.27%) AutoCAD
8 16 (0.21%) Chatbot
9 10 (0.13%) Simulink
9 10 (0.13%) SOLIDWORKS
10 9 (0.12%) Trello
11 8 (0.10%) Adobe Creative Suite
11 8 (0.10%) Adobe Illustrator
12 6 (0.078%) Revit
13 5 (0.065%) Fusion 360
13 5 (0.065%) Lightworks
13 5 (0.065%) Photoshop
14 3 (0.039%) Autodesk Inventor
14 3 (0.039%) Civil 3D
14 3 (0.039%) Windchill
Business Applications
1 83 (1.07%) SAP S/4HANA
2 70 (0.91%) Dynamics CRM
3 51 (0.66%) NetSuite
4 20 (0.26%) Shopify
5 19 (0.25%) Oracle EBS
6 18 (0.23%) Magento
7 14 (0.18%) Elite 3E
7 14 (0.18%) IBM Planning Analytics
7 14 (0.18%) SAP ERP
8 13 (0.17%) SAP Business One
9 11 (0.14%) Dynamics AX
9 11 (0.14%) Salesforce CRM
10 10 (0.13%) JDE EnterpriseOne
11 9 (0.12%) iTrent
11 9 (0.12%) Oracle Applications
11 9 (0.12%) Sage 50
11 9 (0.12%) Sage X3
12 8 (0.10%) Maximo
13 7 (0.091%) Raiser’s Edge
14 6 (0.078%) NEC Housing
Cloud Services
1 1,628 (21.05%) Azure
2 1,245 (16.10%) Microsoft 365
3 980 (12.67%) AWS
4 642 (8.30%) Power Platform
5 368 (4.76%) Entra ID
6 353 (4.56%) SaaS
7 341 (4.41%) GCP
8 185 (2.39%) Serverless
9 177 (2.29%) GitHub
10 176 (2.28%) Azure DevOps
11 167 (2.16%) Dynamics 365
12 158 (2.04%) Power Automate
13 140 (1.81%) PowerApps
14 106 (1.37%) OneDrive
15 99 (1.28%) Microsoft Copilot
16 98 (1.27%) Amazon S3
17 89 (1.15%) GitHub Actions
18 87 (1.13%) AWS Lambda
19 79 (1.02%) AWS CloudFormation
20 71 (0.92%) Azure Data Factory
Communications & Networking
1 491 (6.35%) Firewall
2 441 (5.70%) DNS
3 373 (4.82%) DHCP
4 301 (3.89%) VPN
5 268 (3.47%) TCP/IP
6 228 (2.95%) WAN
7 216 (2.79%) LAN
8 201 (2.60%) Wi-Fi
9 166 (2.15%) Wireless
10 149 (1.93%) Broadband
10 149 (1.93%) VLAN
11 133 (1.72%) Network Security
12 103 (1.33%) VoIP
13 48 (0.62%) SD-WAN
14 45 (0.58%) HTTP
14 45 (0.58%) Internet
15 41 (0.53%) OSPF
16 40 (0.52%) BGP
16 40 (0.52%) SAN
17 32 (0.41%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 498 (6.44%) Power BI
2 374 (4.84%) SQL Server
3 147 (1.90%) Data Warehouse
4 137 (1.77%) Amazon RDS
5 125 (1.62%) MySQL
6 118 (1.53%) Tableau
7 117 (1.51%) Relational Database
8 113 (1.46%) PostgreSQL
9 108 (1.40%) NoSQL
10 97 (1.25%) SQL Server Reporting Services
11 86 (1.11%) SQL Server Integration Services
12 64 (0.83%) MongoDB
13 57 (0.74%) Big Data
13 57 (0.74%) Power Query
14 52 (0.67%) Data Lake
15 49 (0.63%) Azure SQL Database
16 40 (0.52%) DynamoDB
17 38 (0.49%) Metadata
18 34 (0.44%) Amazon Redshift
19 29 (0.38%) Elasticsearch
Development Applications
1 335 (4.33%) Git
2 264 (3.41%) JIRA
3 122 (1.58%) Jenkins
4 114 (1.47%) GitLab
5 36 (0.47%) Selenium
6 29 (0.38%) Eclipse
7 28 (0.36%) Cucumber
7 28 (0.36%) JUnit
7 28 (0.36%) Subversion
8 27 (0.35%) Rational DOORS
9 26 (0.34%) Claude Code
10 24 (0.31%) Cypress.io
11 23 (0.30%) Postman
12 20 (0.26%) Visual Studio
13 17 (0.22%) Bitbucket
14 16 (0.21%) Chocolatey
14 16 (0.21%) SonarQube
15 15 (0.19%) Oracle Forms
16 13 (0.17%) Maven
16 13 (0.17%) MLflow
General
1 3,732 (48.26%) Social Skills
2 2,299 (29.73%) Analytical Skills
3 1,512 (19.55%) Finance
4 525 (6.79%) Manufacturing
5 485 (6.27%) Organisational Skills
6 432 (5.59%) Law
7 420 (5.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 369 (4.77%) Retail
9 324 (4.19%) Marketing
10 298 (3.85%) Legal
11 296 (3.83%) Banking
12 293 (3.79%) Public Sector
13 183 (2.37%) Telecoms
14 171 (2.21%) Electronics
15 148 (1.91%) Influencing Skills
16 143 (1.85%) Presentation Skills
17 136 (1.76%) Aerospace
18 117 (1.51%) Documentation Skills
19 95 (1.23%) Advertising
20 91 (1.18%) Games
Job Titles
1 1,019 (13.18%) Analyst
2 899 (11.63%) Senior
3 764 (9.88%) Developer
4 714 (9.23%) IT Support
5 580 (7.50%) Support Engineer
6 464 (6.00%) Lead
7 412 (5.33%) IT Engineer
8 374 (4.84%) Consultant
9 315 (4.07%) IT Support Engineer
10 309 (4.00%) Support Analyst
11 285 (3.69%) Software Engineer
12 261 (3.38%) Architect
13 258 (3.34%) Systems Engineer
14 253 (3.27%) Support Technician
15 235 (3.04%) Technical Support
16 210 (2.72%) IT Technician
17 195 (2.52%) Technical Engineer
18 194 (2.51%) Data Engineer
19 175 (2.26%) Technical Support Engineer
20 170 (2.20%) Administrator
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 329 (4.25%) .NET
2 297 (3.84%) React
3 241 (3.12%) REST
4 238 (3.08%) HTML
5 189 (2.44%) CSS
6 167 (2.16%) RESTful
7 149 (1.93%) Node.js
8 113 (1.46%) SOAP
9 101 (1.31%) Spring
10 95 (1.23%) AngularJS
11 94 (1.22%) JSON
12 91 (1.18%) Middleware
12 91 (1.18%) Vue
13 83 (1.07%) Kafka
14 74 (0.96%) ASP.NET
14 74 (0.96%) Web Services
14 74 (0.96%) XML
15 73 (0.94%) OAuth
16 64 (0.83%) Spring Boot
17 49 (0.63%) LangChain
Miscellaneous
1 479 (6.19%) Driving Licence
2 464 (6.00%) Onboarding
3 396 (5.12%) Self-Motivation
4 305 (3.94%) Management Information System
5 293 (3.79%) Cloud Native
6 209 (2.70%) Product Ownership
7 180 (2.33%) Data Centre
8 178 (2.30%) Legacy Systems
9 172 (2.22%) Distributed Systems
10 124 (1.60%) Analytical Mindset
11 119 (1.54%) Enterprise Software
12 108 (1.40%) Security Posture
13 102 (1.32%) Data Structures
14 94 (1.22%) Algorithms
15 85 (1.10%) Social Media
16 81 (1.05%) NHS
17 77 (1.00%) Virtual Team
18 76 (0.98%) Cyber Threat
18 76 (0.98%) IoT
19 75 (0.97%) Mobile App
Operating Systems
1 1,219 (15.76%) Windows
2 551 (7.13%) Linux
3 525 (6.79%) Windows Server
4 168 (2.17%) Windows 10
5 122 (1.58%) Windows Server 2016
6 112 (1.45%) Android
7 102 (1.32%) Mac OS
8 96 (1.24%) Apple iOS
9 49 (0.63%) Unix
10 48 (0.62%) Windows Server 2019
11 39 (0.50%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
12 33 (0.43%) Ubuntu
13 27 (0.35%) VMS
14 25 (0.32%) CentOS
15 14 (0.18%) Mac OS X
15 14 (0.18%) Windows 7
15 14 (0.18%) Windows Server 2012
16 13 (0.17%) Debian
17 9 (0.12%) FreeRTOS
18 8 (0.10%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 1,795 (23.21%) Continuous Improvement
2 1,240 (16.04%) Agile
3 1,143 (14.78%) Customer Service
4 964 (12.47%) AI
5 869 (11.24%) CI/CD
6 865 (11.19%) Decision-Making
7 829 (10.72%) Mentoring
8 778 (10.06%) Stakeholder Management
9 727 (9.40%) DevOps
10 718 (9.28%) Analytics
11 705 (9.12%) Software Engineering
12 663 (8.57%) ITIL
13 623 (8.06%) Cybersecurity
14 599 (7.75%) Roadmaps
15 580 (7.50%) Business Intelligence
16 559 (7.23%) Computer Science
17 540 (6.98%) Project Management
18 529 (6.84%) Project Delivery
19 504 (6.52%) Collaborative Working
20 494 (6.39%) Stakeholder Engagement
Programming Languages
1 1,233 (15.94%) SQL
2 1,146 (14.82%) Python
3 532 (6.88%) JavaScript
4 434 (5.61%) C#
5 396 (5.12%) Java
6 337 (4.36%) PowerShell
7 242 (3.13%) TypeScript
8 211 (2.73%) C++
9 171 (2.21%) Bash
10 94 (1.22%) PHP
11 86 (1.11%) Go
12 82 (1.06%) C
13 68 (0.88%) T-SQL
14 66 (0.85%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 49 (0.63%) Scala
16 42 (0.54%) R
16 42 (0.54%) Rust
16 42 (0.54%) Shell Script
17 41 (0.53%) Perl
17 41 (0.53%) PL/SQL
Qualifications
1 1,266 (16.37%) Degree
2 669 (8.65%) Security Cleared
3 464 (6.00%) SC Cleared
4 291 (3.76%) Computer Science Degree
5 214 (2.77%) DBS Check
6 201 (2.60%) Microsoft Certification
7 147 (1.90%) Cisco Certification
7 147 (1.90%) DV Cleared
8 134 (1.73%) Azure Certification
9 133 (1.72%) CISSP
10 110 (1.42%) Master's Degree
11 107 (1.38%) BPSS Clearance
12 91 (1.18%) PMI Certification
13 80 (1.03%) CCNA
13 80 (1.03%) PMP
14 77 (1.00%) CCNP
15 75 (0.97%) HNC
16 71 (0.92%) ACCA
16 71 (0.92%) CISM
17 66 (0.85%) CIMA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 430 (5.56%) QA
2 385 (4.98%) Data Quality
3 314 (4.06%) GDPR
4 222 (2.87%) SLA
5 218 (2.82%) Cyber Essentials
6 201 (2.60%) Accessibility
7 195 (2.52%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 161 (2.08%) PCI DSS
9 155 (2.00%) NIST
10 63 (0.81%) PMO
11 57 (0.74%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
12 36 (0.47%) GRC
13 35 (0.45%) ISO 9001
14 30 (0.39%) SOC 2
15 25 (0.32%) GMP
16 24 (0.31%) COBIT
17 21 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
18 20 (0.26%) Sarbanes-Oxley
19 18 (0.23%) Good Clinical Practice
19 18 (0.23%) WCAG
System Software
1 813 (10.51%) Active Directory
2 366 (4.73%) Docker
3 273 (3.53%) Hyper-V
4 247 (3.19%) VMware Infrastructure
5 77 (1.00%) Terminal Server
6 46 (0.59%) Virtual Desktop
7 45 (0.58%) Firmware
8 35 (0.45%) vSphere
9 33 (0.43%) Virtual Machines
10 17 (0.22%) VMware ESXi
11 15 (0.19%) KVM
12 14 (0.18%) Embedded Firmware
13 10 (0.13%) IAG
14 7 (0.091%) VMware NSX
14 7 (0.091%) XenApp
15 5 (0.065%) ClearTrust
15 5 (0.065%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 5 (0.065%) Squid
15 5 (0.065%) VMware Workstation
16 3 (0.039%) Terminal Services
Systems Management
1 354 (4.58%) Terraform
2 319 (4.13%) Kubernetes
3 291 (3.76%) Microsoft Intune
4 154 (1.99%) Ansible
5 103 (1.33%) Grafana
6 83 (1.07%) SCCM
7 63 (0.81%) Prometheus
8 39 (0.50%) Single Sign-On
9 31 (0.40%) Nagios
10 24 (0.31%) FortiGate
11 22 (0.28%) Jamf Pro
12 19 (0.25%) Puppet
13 16 (0.21%) Argo
14 15 (0.19%) Autotask
15 13 (0.17%) Kibana
15 13 (0.17%) Proxmox
16 11 (0.14%) Docker Swarm
16 11 (0.14%) logstash
16 11 (0.14%) vCenter Server
16 11 (0.14%) ZABBIX
Vendors
1 2,236 (28.92%) Microsoft
2 364 (4.71%) VMware
3 207 (2.68%) Oracle
4 202 (2.61%) SAP
5 201 (2.60%) Google
6 171 (2.21%) Cisco
7 160 (2.07%) ServiceNow
8 149 (1.93%) Salesforce
9 136 (1.76%) Veeam
10 133 (1.72%) SolarWinds
11 129 (1.67%) Splunk
12 119 (1.54%) Databricks
13 85 (1.10%) Tanium
14 84 (1.09%) Apple
15 78 (1.01%) Nimble Storage
16 77 (1.00%) Brocade
17 67 (0.87%) Sage
18 64 (0.83%) Dell
19 56 (0.72%) Fortinet
20 54 (0.70%) Red Hat