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 2 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
2 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 7 4 7
Rank change year-on-year -3 +3 +4
Permanent jobs citing Problem-Solving 8,457 8,339 10,631
As % of all permanent jobs in England 8.70% 19.11% 14.90%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 11.85% 21.56% 18.34%
Number of salaries quoted 5,867 4,715 5,099
10th Percentile £27,750 £26,250 £27,000
25th Percentile £33,125 £31,250 £36,250
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £47,500 £45,000 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +5.56% -10.00% -9.09%
75th Percentile £66,000 £67,500 £70,000
90th Percentile £85,000 £86,250 £85,000
UK median annual salary £47,500 £45,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +5.56% -10.00% -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 71,345 38,684 57,956
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in England 73.38% 88.66% 81.23%
Number of salaries quoted 50,773 22,445 35,770
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £31,250
25th Percentile £42,125 £37,500 £41,250
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 £76,000
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £95,000
UK median annual salary £60,000 £55,000 £56,075
% change year-on-year +9.09% -1.92% -6.54%

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 2 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 2 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 -6 2,277 £65,000 - 5,028
North of England -8 1,713 £45,000 +7.14% 1,431
South East -4 1,618 £42,500 - 1,465
Midlands -7 1,237 £42,500 +11.11% 1,004
North West -5 888 £45,625 +0.27% 806
South West -4 843 £45,000 +25.00% 894
West Midlands -9 693 £42,500 -0.28% 628
East of England -4 690 £42,500 +21.43% 694
Yorkshire -8 557 £42,500 +21.43% 443
East Midlands -9 542 £41,000 +17.14% 378
North East -4 268 £48,250 +25.32% 207
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
1 487 (5.76%) SharePoint
2 399 (4.72%) Microsoft Exchange
3 103 (1.22%) Confluence
4 59 (0.70%) IIS
5 48 (0.57%) Apache
6 44 (0.52%) CMS
7 38 (0.45%) Apache Spark
8 37 (0.44%) Apache Airflow
9 35 (0.41%) WordPress
10 21 (0.25%) SAS
11 13 (0.15%) Palantir Foundry
12 11 (0.13%) nginx
12 11 (0.13%) WebLogic
12 11 (0.13%) WebSphere
13 9 (0.11%) Jupyter
13 9 (0.11%) Oracle SOA Suite
14 8 (0.095%) Exchange Server 2013
14 8 (0.095%) Oracle Workflow
14 8 (0.095%) Tomcat
15 7 (0.083%) OpenEdge
Applications
1 540 (6.39%) Microsoft Office
2 487 (5.76%) Microsoft Excel
3 91 (1.08%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 48 (0.57%) Spreadsheet
5 46 (0.54%) MS Visio
6 43 (0.51%) Microsoft Project
7 34 (0.40%) AutoCAD
8 23 (0.27%) Simulink
9 19 (0.22%) Revit
10 16 (0.19%) Chatbot
11 10 (0.12%) SOLIDWORKS
12 8 (0.095%) Adobe Creative Suite
12 8 (0.095%) Trello
13 7 (0.083%) Adobe Illustrator
13 7 (0.083%) Autodesk Flame
13 7 (0.083%) Baselight
13 7 (0.083%) Fusion 360
14 6 (0.071%) EPLAN
14 6 (0.071%) Navisworks
15 5 (0.059%) Lightworks
Business Applications
1 88 (1.04%) Dynamics CRM
2 85 (1.01%) SAP S/4HANA
3 72 (0.85%) NetSuite
4 32 (0.38%) Shopify
5 29 (0.34%) Oracle EBS
6 17 (0.20%) Magento
7 15 (0.18%) IBM Planning Analytics
8 14 (0.17%) SAP Business One
9 13 (0.15%) Dynamics AX
9 13 (0.15%) Elite 3E
9 13 (0.15%) Oracle Payables
9 13 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
9 13 (0.15%) SAP ERP
10 11 (0.13%) Dynamics NAV
10 11 (0.13%) Oracle ERP
11 10 (0.12%) JDE EnterpriseOne
11 10 (0.12%) Oracle Applications
11 10 (0.12%) Sage X3
12 9 (0.11%) Primavera
12 9 (0.11%) Sage 50
Cloud Services
1 1,738 (20.55%) Azure
2 1,329 (15.71%) Microsoft 365
3 1,038 (12.27%) AWS
4 710 (8.40%) Power Platform
5 413 (4.88%) Entra ID
6 371 (4.39%) SaaS
7 347 (4.10%) GCP
8 215 (2.54%) Azure DevOps
9 209 (2.47%) GitHub
10 188 (2.22%) Serverless
11 186 (2.20%) Power Automate
12 185 (2.19%) Dynamics 365
13 158 (1.87%) PowerApps
14 125 (1.48%) Microsoft Copilot
15 123 (1.45%) OneDrive
16 102 (1.21%) Amazon S3
17 96 (1.14%) GitHub Actions
18 88 (1.04%) AWS Lambda
19 84 (0.99%) AWS CloudFormation
20 82 (0.97%) Google Workspace
Communications & Networking
1 516 (6.10%) Firewall
2 480 (5.68%) DNS
3 406 (4.80%) DHCP
4 331 (3.91%) VPN
5 292 (3.45%) TCP/IP
6 216 (2.55%) Wi-Fi
7 201 (2.38%) WAN
8 197 (2.33%) LAN
9 185 (2.19%) Wireless
10 176 (2.08%) VLAN
11 153 (1.81%) Network Security
12 110 (1.30%) VoIP
13 108 (1.28%) Broadband
14 53 (0.63%) Internet
15 41 (0.48%) HTTP
16 40 (0.47%) SAN
17 36 (0.43%) SD-WAN
18 35 (0.41%) BGP
18 35 (0.41%) OSPF
19 34 (0.40%) SSL
Database & Business Intelligence
1 554 (6.55%) Power BI
2 417 (4.93%) SQL Server
3 142 (1.68%) Data Warehouse
4 140 (1.66%) MySQL
4 140 (1.66%) Relational Database
5 137 (1.62%) Amazon RDS
6 124 (1.47%) Tableau
7 115 (1.36%) PostgreSQL
8 103 (1.22%) NoSQL
9 94 (1.11%) SQL Server Reporting Services
10 83 (0.98%) SQL Server Integration Services
11 65 (0.77%) Big Data
12 63 (0.74%) MongoDB
13 60 (0.71%) Data Lake
14 59 (0.70%) Azure SQL Database
15 53 (0.63%) Power Query
16 49 (0.58%) Metadata
17 43 (0.51%) DynamoDB
18 41 (0.48%) Electronic Patient Records
19 37 (0.44%) Looker
Development Applications
1 375 (4.43%) Git
2 296 (3.50%) JIRA
3 135 (1.60%) Jenkins
4 106 (1.25%) GitLab
5 40 (0.47%) Selenium
6 38 (0.45%) Eclipse
7 37 (0.44%) Claude Code
8 34 (0.40%) JUnit
9 33 (0.39%) Subversion
10 29 (0.34%) Cucumber
11 25 (0.30%) Postman
12 24 (0.28%) Rational DOORS
13 22 (0.26%) Cypress.io
14 21 (0.25%) Bitbucket
14 21 (0.25%) Oracle Forms
15 18 (0.21%) SonarQube
16 17 (0.20%) Visual Studio
17 16 (0.19%) Chocolatey
18 15 (0.18%) MLflow
19 14 (0.17%) Visual Studio Code
General
1 4,153 (49.11%) Social Skills
2 2,559 (30.26%) Analytical Skills
3 1,678 (19.84%) Finance
4 669 (7.91%) Manufacturing
5 554 (6.55%) Organisational Skills
6 507 (6.00%) Inclusion and Diversity
6 507 (6.00%) Law
7 417 (4.93%) Retail
8 358 (4.23%) Marketing
9 337 (3.98%) Public Sector
10 322 (3.81%) Legal
11 299 (3.54%) Banking
12 236 (2.79%) Electronics
13 221 (2.61%) Aerospace
14 187 (2.21%) Telecoms
15 182 (2.15%) Influencing Skills
16 160 (1.89%) Presentation Skills
17 106 (1.25%) Documentation Skills
18 97 (1.15%) Automotive
19 92 (1.09%) Advertising
Job Titles
1 1,102 (13.03%) Analyst
2 927 (10.96%) Senior
3 810 (9.58%) Developer
4 726 (8.58%) IT Support
5 581 (6.87%) Support Engineer
6 517 (6.11%) Lead
7 426 (5.04%) Consultant
8 401 (4.74%) IT Engineer
9 360 (4.26%) Support Analyst
10 317 (3.75%) Software Engineer
11 310 (3.67%) IT Support Engineer
12 279 (3.30%) Architect
13 264 (3.12%) Technical Support
14 258 (3.05%) Systems Engineer
15 250 (2.96%) Support Technician
16 223 (2.64%) IT Technician
17 217 (2.57%) Technical Engineer
18 192 (2.27%) Data Engineer
18 192 (2.27%) Technical Support Engineer
19 181 (2.14%) Business Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 382 (4.52%) .NET
2 371 (4.39%) Terraform
3 306 (3.62%) React
4 275 (3.25%) REST
5 258 (3.05%) HTML
6 199 (2.35%) CSS
7 179 (2.12%) RESTful
8 146 (1.73%) Node.js
9 117 (1.38%) Spring
10 116 (1.37%) SOAP
11 102 (1.21%) JSON
12 101 (1.19%) AngularJS
13 98 (1.16%) Web Services
14 94 (1.11%) ASP.NET
15 92 (1.09%) Vue
16 90 (1.06%) Kafka
17 88 (1.04%) Middleware
18 85 (1.01%) XML
19 76 (0.90%) Spring Boot
20 72 (0.85%) OAuth
Miscellaneous
1 566 (6.69%) Onboarding
2 562 (6.65%) Driving Licence
3 438 (5.18%) Self-Motivation
4 352 (4.16%) Management Information System
5 312 (3.69%) Cloud Native
6 247 (2.92%) Product Ownership
7 186 (2.20%) Data Centre
8 177 (2.09%) Legacy Systems
9 159 (1.88%) Enterprise Software
10 149 (1.76%) Distributed Systems
11 118 (1.40%) Data Structures
12 114 (1.35%) Analytical Mindset
13 113 (1.34%) Security Posture
14 106 (1.25%) Cyber Threat
15 104 (1.23%) NHS
16 102 (1.21%) AI Agents
17 97 (1.15%) Robotics
18 91 (1.08%) Algorithms
19 86 (1.02%) Virtual Team
20 84 (0.99%) IoT
Operating Systems
1 1,295 (15.31%) Windows
2 565 (6.68%) Linux
3 551 (6.52%) Windows Server
4 161 (1.90%) Windows 10
5 112 (1.32%) Windows Server 2016
6 105 (1.24%) Mac OS
7 97 (1.15%) Apple iOS
8 93 (1.10%) Android
9 56 (0.66%) Unix
10 48 (0.57%) Windows Server 2019
11 31 (0.37%) Ubuntu
11 31 (0.37%) VMS
12 30 (0.35%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
13 15 (0.18%) CentOS
14 13 (0.15%) Windows Server 2012
15 11 (0.13%) Debian
16 10 (0.12%) Embedded Linux
16 10 (0.12%) Rocky
17 9 (0.11%) FreeRTOS
17 9 (0.11%) Mac OS X
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,108 (24.93%) Continuous Improvement
2 1,387 (16.40%) Agile
3 1,306 (15.44%) Customer Service
4 1,094 (12.94%) AI
5 1,020 (12.06%) Decision-Making
6 957 (11.32%) Stakeholder Management
7 925 (10.94%) Mentoring
8 913 (10.80%) CI/CD
9 792 (9.37%) Analytics
10 786 (9.29%) Software Engineering
11 762 (9.01%) DevOps
12 705 (8.34%) Cybersecurity
13 669 (7.91%) Roadmaps
14 661 (7.82%) ITIL
14 661 (7.82%) Project Delivery
15 630 (7.45%) Business Intelligence
16 619 (7.32%) Project Management
17 607 (7.18%) Computer Science
18 573 (6.78%) Stakeholder Engagement
19 557 (6.59%) Collaborative Working
Programming Languages
1 1,322 (15.63%) SQL
2 1,187 (14.04%) Python
3 577 (6.82%) JavaScript
4 490 (5.79%) C#
5 429 (5.07%) Java
6 380 (4.49%) PowerShell
7 256 (3.03%) TypeScript
8 228 (2.70%) C++
9 173 (2.05%) Bash
10 95 (1.12%) C
11 88 (1.04%) PHP
12 74 (0.88%) Go
13 72 (0.85%) T-SQL
14 70 (0.83%) Data Analysis Expressions
15 50 (0.59%) Rust
16 48 (0.57%) Perl
16 48 (0.57%) Shell Script
17 44 (0.52%) PL/SQL
18 42 (0.50%) R
18 42 (0.50%) Ruby
Qualifications
1 1,475 (17.44%) Degree
2 791 (9.35%) Security Cleared
3 528 (6.24%) SC Cleared
4 322 (3.81%) Computer Science Degree
5 245 (2.90%) DBS Check
6 205 (2.42%) Microsoft Certification
7 192 (2.27%) DV Cleared
8 173 (2.05%) Azure Certification
9 151 (1.79%) CISSP
10 147 (1.74%) Cisco Certification
11 142 (1.68%) BPSS Clearance
12 135 (1.60%) Master's Degree
13 128 (1.51%) HNC
14 113 (1.34%) HND
15 105 (1.24%) PMI Certification
16 85 (1.01%) CISM
17 82 (0.97%) PMP
18 81 (0.96%) CCNA
19 76 (0.90%) CCNP
20 74 (0.88%) AWS Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 499 (5.90%) QA
2 421 (4.98%) Data Quality
3 357 (4.22%) GDPR
4 237 (2.80%) Accessibility
5 225 (2.66%) SLA
6 203 (2.40%) ISO/IEC 27001
7 200 (2.36%) Cyber Essentials
8 163 (1.93%) NIST
9 141 (1.67%) PCI DSS
10 62 (0.73%) PMO
11 55 (0.65%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
12 40 (0.47%) GRC
13 37 (0.44%) ISO 9001
14 26 (0.31%) NCSC
15 24 (0.28%) SOC 2
16 23 (0.27%) Actionable Recommendations
16 23 (0.27%) Sarbanes-Oxley
17 21 (0.25%) COBIT
18 19 (0.22%) GMP
19 18 (0.21%) Good Clinical Practice
System Software
1 867 (10.25%) Active Directory
2 364 (4.30%) Docker
3 286 (3.38%) Hyper-V
4 260 (3.07%) VMware Infrastructure
5 70 (0.83%) Terminal Server
6 61 (0.72%) Firmware
7 51 (0.60%) Virtual Desktop
8 46 (0.54%) Virtual Machines
9 35 (0.41%) vSphere
10 21 (0.25%) Embedded Firmware
11 19 (0.22%) VMware ESXi
12 12 (0.14%) KVM
13 9 (0.11%) Virtual Servers
14 6 (0.071%) GPFS
14 6 (0.071%) IAG
14 6 (0.071%) StorNext
15 5 (0.059%) ClearTrust
15 5 (0.059%) Slurm Workload Manager
15 5 (0.059%) Squid
15 5 (0.059%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 330 (3.90%) Kubernetes
2 287 (3.39%) Microsoft Intune
3 153 (1.81%) Ansible
4 93 (1.10%) Grafana
5 76 (0.90%) SCCM
6 67 (0.79%) Single Sign-On
7 49 (0.58%) Prometheus
8 27 (0.32%) FortiGate
8 27 (0.32%) Jamf Pro
9 21 (0.25%) Nagios
10 19 (0.22%) Puppet
11 16 (0.19%) Argo
12 14 (0.17%) BMC PATROL
13 13 (0.15%) Functional Safety
13 13 (0.15%) Kibana
14 12 (0.14%) Proxmox
15 11 (0.13%) Autotask
15 11 (0.13%) logstash
15 11 (0.13%) Nmap
15 11 (0.13%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 2,477 (29.29%) Microsoft
2 382 (4.52%) VMware
3 270 (3.19%) SAP
4 248 (2.93%) Google
5 246 (2.91%) Oracle
6 171 (2.02%) Cisco
6 171 (2.02%) ServiceNow
7 164 (1.94%) Salesforce
8 135 (1.60%) Veeam
9 132 (1.56%) Databricks
10 123 (1.45%) Splunk
11 109 (1.29%) SolarWinds
12 84 (0.99%) Sage
13 78 (0.92%) Tanium
14 75 (0.89%) Apple
15 71 (0.84%) Nimble Storage
16 70 (0.83%) Brocade
17 68 (0.80%) Fortinet
18 59 (0.70%) HubSpot
19 58 (0.69%) Dell