Security Hardening Job Trends in the South East

Security Hardening
England > South East

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs advertised in the South East requiring Security Hardening skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 7 August 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
7 Aug 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 309 287 342
Rank change year-on-year -22 +55 -39
Permanent jobs citing Security Hardening 10 8 1
As % of all permanent jobs in the South East 0.059% 0.092% 0.007%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.083% 0.10% 0.009%
Number of salaries quoted 8 7 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £67,500 £56,250 -
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £82,500 £57,500 -
Median % change year-on-year +43.48% - -
75th Percentile £85,938 £58,750 -
90th Percentile £92,500 - -
England median annual salary £65,000 £72,500 £52,500
% change year-on-year -10.34% +38.10% +7.14%

All Process & Methodology Skills
South East

Security Hardening 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 the South East.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 12,058 7,680 11,218
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the South East 71.68% 88.16% 80.83%
Number of salaries quoted 8,595 4,144 7,358
10th Percentile £30,000 £26,750 £30,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £33,750 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £50,000 £52,349
Median % change year-on-year +10.00% -4.49% -4.82%
75th Percentile £70,000 £67,500 £66,250
90th Percentile £85,000 £81,250 £80,000
England median annual salary £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
% change year-on-year +9.09% - -12.00%

Security Hardening
Job Vacancy Trend in the South East

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Security Hardening relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised in the South East.

Security Hardening job vacancy trend in the South East

Security Hardening
Salary Trend in the South East

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Security Hardening.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the South East citing Security Hardening

Security Hardening
Salary Histogram in the South East

Salary distribution for jobs citing Security Hardening in the South East over the 6 months to 7 August 2026.

Salary histogram for Security Hardening in the South East

Security Hardening
Job Locations in the South East

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Security Hardening within the South East region over the 6 months to 7 August 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
Berkshire +21 8 £76,250 -
Thames Valley +14 8 £76,250 - 2
Hampshire -50 2 £85,000 +47.83% 2
Security Hardening
England

Security Hardening
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the South East 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:

Cloud Services
1 5 (50.00%) Amazon EC2
1 5 (50.00%) Amazon EKS
1 5 (50.00%) Amazon S3
1 5 (50.00%) AWS
1 5 (50.00%) AWS Lambda
1 5 (50.00%) Serverless
Communications & Networking
1 3 (30.00%) Firewall
1 3 (30.00%) TCP/IP
2 2 (20.00%) DHCP
2 2 (20.00%) DNS
Development Applications
1 5 (50.00%) Cucumber
1 5 (50.00%) Git
1 5 (50.00%) GitLab
1 5 (50.00%) Jenkins
1 5 (50.00%) JIRA
1 5 (50.00%) SonarQube
2 4 (40.00%) Artifactory
General
1 6 (60.00%) Social Skills
2 3 (30.00%) Retail
Job Titles
1 5 (50.00%) DevOps Engineer
2 4 (40.00%) Senior
3 3 (30.00%) Cybersecurity Engineer
3 3 (30.00%) Security Engineer
3 3 (30.00%) Senior Security Engineer
4 2 (20.00%) Developer
4 2 (20.00%) DevOps Developer
4 2 (20.00%) Java Developer
4 2 (20.00%) Java Engineer
4 2 (20.00%) Lead
4 2 (20.00%) SC Cleared Java Developer
4 2 (20.00%) VMware Engineer
5 1 (10.00%) AWS DevOps
5 1 (10.00%) AWS DevOps Engineer
5 1 (10.00%) AWS Engineer
5 1 (10.00%) Senior DevOps
5 1 (10.00%) Senior DevOps Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (50.00%) JSON
1 5 (50.00%) REST
2 4 (40.00%) Elastic Stack
2 4 (40.00%) RabbitMQ
2 4 (40.00%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 5 (50.00%) Distributed Systems
2 2 (20.00%) Data Centre
Operating Systems
1 7 (70.00%) Linux
2 2 (20.00%) Windows
Processes & Methodologies
1 5 (50.00%) Agile
1 5 (50.00%) Auto-Scaling
1 5 (50.00%) Change Control
1 5 (50.00%) CI/CD
1 5 (50.00%) Deployment Automation
1 5 (50.00%) DevOps
1 5 (50.00%) Infrastructure as Code
1 5 (50.00%) Microservices
1 5 (50.00%) Test Automation
2 4 (40.00%) Issue Tracking
2 4 (40.00%) Secrets Management
3 3 (30.00%) Computer Science
3 3 (30.00%) Continuous Integration
3 3 (30.00%) Cybersecurity
3 3 (30.00%) Migration
3 3 (30.00%) OWASP
3 3 (30.00%) Penetration Testing
3 3 (30.00%) Security Operations
3 3 (30.00%) SIEM
3 3 (30.00%) Vulnerability Management
Programming Languages
1 5 (50.00%) Groovy
1 5 (50.00%) Java
1 5 (50.00%) Python
2 3 (30.00%) Perl
3 1 (10.00%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 6 (60.00%) Security Cleared
2 3 (30.00%) CCNA
2 3 (30.00%) CCNP
2 3 (30.00%) Cisco Certification
2 3 (30.00%) CISSP
2 3 (30.00%) CompTIA Security+
2 3 (30.00%) Computer Science Degree
2 3 (30.00%) Degree
2 3 (30.00%) GCIA
2 3 (30.00%) SANS
2 3 (30.00%) SC Cleared
3 2 (20.00%) DV Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (50.00%) QA
2 3 (30.00%) Cyber Essentials
2 3 (30.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 2 (20.00%) NCSC
3 2 (20.00%) NIST
3 2 (20.00%) SLA
System Software
1 2 (20.00%) Active Directory
1 2 (20.00%) UAG
1 2 (20.00%) VMware ESXi
1 2 (20.00%) VMware Infrastructure
2 1 (10.00%) Docker
Systems Management
1 5 (50.00%) Ansible
1 5 (50.00%) Kubernetes
1 5 (50.00%) Terraform
2 4 (40.00%) Packer
3 2 (20.00%) Active Directory Federation Services
3 2 (20.00%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 4 (40.00%) AppDynamics
1 4 (40.00%) IBM
2 2 (20.00%) Becrypt
2 2 (20.00%) Cisco
2 2 (20.00%) Microsoft
2 2 (20.00%) VMware
3 1 (10.00%) Atlassian