Problem-Solving Job Trends in the UK excluding London

Problem Solving
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Problem-Solving skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 16 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
16 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 6 4 3
Rank change year-on-year -2 -1 +5
Permanent jobs citing Problem-Solving 8,463 6,198 7,659
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 9.70% 18.17% 15.40%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.68% 20.89% 19.34%
Number of salaries quoted 5,662 3,498 2,822
10th Percentile £27,000 £25,684 £27,000
25th Percentile £31,250 £29,000 £35,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £43,000 £38,297 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +12.28% -23.41% +5.14%
75th Percentile £57,750 £55,000 £65,000
90th Percentile £72,500 £68,750 £81,250
UK median annual salary £46,000 £45,000 £53,000
% change year-on-year +2.22% -15.09% -3.64%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

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 the UK excluding London.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 61,886 29,671 39,606
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 70.92% 87.01% 79.62%
Number of salaries quoted 43,417 16,236 19,810
10th Percentile £30,000 £26,750 £31,250
25th Percentile £40,000 £32,000 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £47,000 £53,000
Median % change year-on-year +17.02% -11.32% -1.85%
75th Percentile £70,000 £63,750 £68,750
90th Percentile £87,500 £80,000 £82,000
UK median annual salary £60,000 £55,000 £60,000
% change year-on-year +9.09% -8.33% -

Problem-Solving
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

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

Problem-Solving job vacancy trend in the UK excluding London

Problem-Solving
Salary Trend in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Problem-Solving.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK excluding London citing Problem-Solving

Problem-Solving
Salary Histogram in the UK excluding London

Salary distribution for jobs citing Problem-Solving in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 16 October 2026.

Salary histogram for Problem-Solving in the UK excluding London

Problem-Solving
Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Problem-Solving within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 16 October 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
North of England -4 2,121 £45,000 +2.27% 404
South East -1 1,986 £41,500 +3.75% 474
Midlands -6 1,525 £42,500 +13.33% 300
North West -7 1,097 £46,500 -4.56% 194
South West -2 1,021 £45,000 +20.00% 278
East of England -1 888 £43,750 +34.62% 173
West Midlands -5 856 £42,500 - 166
East Midlands -7 667 £42,500 +30.77% 134
Yorkshire -6 631 £42,500 +28.79% 143
North East +5 402 £50,000 +53.85% 75
Scotland +6 347 £37,750 +12.69% 68
Northern Ireland +8 344 £70,000 +16.67% 17
Wales -14 246 £42,500 -11.68% 55
Isle of Man +1 4 £35,000 - 1
Problem-Solving
UK

Problem-Solving
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the UK excluding London 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
1 482 (5.70%) SharePoint
2 370 (4.37%) Microsoft Exchange
3 69 (0.82%) Confluence
4 59 (0.70%) CMS
5 55 (0.65%) IIS
6 37 (0.44%) Apache
7 32 (0.38%) Apache Airflow
8 31 (0.37%) WordPress
9 28 (0.33%) Sitecore CMS
10 26 (0.31%) Apache Spark
11 14 (0.17%) Jupyter
11 14 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
12 12 (0.14%) nginx
13 10 (0.12%) WebSphere
14 9 (0.11%) CICS
14 9 (0.11%) WebLogic
15 8 (0.095%) OpenEdge
15 8 (0.095%) SAS
16 4 (0.047%) Oracle SOA Suite
16 4 (0.047%) Tomcat
Applications
1 636 (7.52%) Microsoft Office
2 587 (6.94%) Microsoft Excel
3 93 (1.10%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 60 (0.71%) Spreadsheet
5 58 (0.69%) AutoCAD
6 48 (0.57%) MS Visio
7 43 (0.51%) Microsoft Project
8 41 (0.48%) Simulink
9 34 (0.40%) Revit
10 26 (0.31%) EPLAN
11 18 (0.21%) SOLIDWORKS
12 17 (0.20%) Navisworks
13 14 (0.17%) OrCAD
14 9 (0.11%) Chatbot
15 8 (0.095%) Adobe Creative Suite
16 7 (0.083%) Lightworks
16 7 (0.083%) Siemens NX
17 5 (0.059%) Adobe XD
17 5 (0.059%) Mathematica
17 5 (0.059%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 75 (0.89%) Dynamics CRM
2 64 (0.76%) NetSuite
3 46 (0.54%) SAP S/4HANA
4 33 (0.39%) Shopify
5 23 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
6 21 (0.25%) Workday HCM
7 17 (0.20%) Dynamics NAV
8 16 (0.19%) Dynamics AX
9 15 (0.18%) Oracle Payables
10 13 (0.15%) Salesforce CRM
10 13 (0.15%) SAP Business One
11 12 (0.14%) IBM Planning Analytics
11 12 (0.14%) Oracle Cash Management
11 12 (0.14%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
11 12 (0.14%) SAP ERP
12 11 (0.13%) Payment Gateway
13 10 (0.12%) JDE EnterpriseOne
13 10 (0.12%) Primavera
14 9 (0.11%) Sage 50
14 9 (0.11%) Sage X3
Cloud Services
1 1,475 (17.43%) Azure
2 1,342 (15.86%) Microsoft 365
3 696 (8.22%) AWS
4 639 (7.55%) Power Platform
5 489 (5.78%) Entra ID
6 300 (3.54%) SaaS
7 238 (2.81%) GCP
8 184 (2.17%) Azure DevOps
9 162 (1.91%) PowerApps
10 161 (1.90%) GitHub
11 156 (1.84%) Dynamics 365
12 155 (1.83%) Power Automate
13 137 (1.62%) OneDrive
14 114 (1.35%) Serverless
15 110 (1.30%) Microsoft Copilot
16 85 (1.00%) Google Workspace
17 70 (0.83%) Amazon S3
18 68 (0.80%) AWS CloudFormation
18 68 (0.80%) GitHub Actions
19 57 (0.67%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 476 (5.62%) DNS
2 459 (5.42%) Firewall
3 394 (4.66%) DHCP
4 299 (3.53%) VPN
5 252 (2.98%) TCP/IP
6 221 (2.61%) Wi-Fi
7 201 (2.38%) WAN
8 198 (2.34%) LAN
9 185 (2.19%) Wireless
10 163 (1.93%) VLAN
11 132 (1.56%) Network Security
12 111 (1.31%) VoIP
13 69 (0.82%) Internet
14 68 (0.80%) Broadband
15 33 (0.39%) Remote Desktop
16 32 (0.38%) SAN
16 32 (0.38%) SSL
17 31 (0.37%) 5G
18 29 (0.34%) Ethernet
19 27 (0.32%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 498 (5.88%) Power BI
2 332 (3.92%) SQL Server
3 139 (1.64%) MySQL
3 139 (1.64%) Relational Database
4 123 (1.45%) Amazon RDS
5 111 (1.31%) Data Warehouse
6 96 (1.13%) PostgreSQL
7 87 (1.03%) NoSQL
8 67 (0.79%) Tableau
9 63 (0.74%) SQL Server Reporting Services
10 57 (0.67%) MongoDB
11 55 (0.65%) Azure SQL Database
12 54 (0.64%) Power Query
13 53 (0.63%) Data Lake
14 50 (0.59%) Big Data
15 48 (0.57%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 47 (0.56%) Electronic Patient Records
17 34 (0.40%) Metadata
18 33 (0.39%) Oracle Reports
19 27 (0.32%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 329 (3.89%) Git
2 251 (2.97%) JIRA
3 104 (1.23%) GitLab
4 95 (1.12%) Jenkins
5 40 (0.47%) Eclipse
5 40 (0.47%) Selenium
6 34 (0.40%) Subversion
7 32 (0.38%) Cucumber
8 31 (0.37%) Claude Code
9 27 (0.32%) Cypress.io
10 26 (0.31%) JUnit
11 25 (0.30%) Oracle Forms
11 25 (0.30%) Rational DOORS
12 23 (0.27%) Postman
13 22 (0.26%) LabVIEW
14 20 (0.24%) Bitbucket
15 18 (0.21%) Burp Suite
16 15 (0.18%) Metasploit
17 14 (0.17%) Team Foundation Server
17 14 (0.17%) Visual Studio
General
1 4,170 (49.27%) Social Skills
2 2,340 (27.65%) Analytical Skills
3 1,365 (16.13%) Finance
4 1,090 (12.88%) Manufacturing
5 722 (8.53%) Organisational Skills
6 466 (5.51%) Retail
7 465 (5.49%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 414 (4.89%) Electronics
9 395 (4.67%) Public Sector
10 354 (4.18%) Aerospace
11 346 (4.09%) Legal
12 339 (4.01%) Law
13 306 (3.62%) Marketing
14 214 (2.53%) Telecoms
15 164 (1.94%) Influencing Skills
16 160 (1.89%) Automotive
17 147 (1.74%) Documentation Skills
18 131 (1.55%) Presentation Skills
19 116 (1.37%) Banking
20 111 (1.31%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,103 (13.03%) Analyst
2 871 (10.29%) Senior
3 779 (9.20%) IT Support
4 751 (8.87%) Developer
5 601 (7.10%) Support Engineer
6 434 (5.13%) Lead
7 421 (4.97%) Support Analyst
8 392 (4.63%) IT Engineer
9 365 (4.31%) Consultant
10 303 (3.58%) IT Support Engineer
11 294 (3.47%) Technical Support
12 267 (3.15%) Support Technician
13 246 (2.91%) Technical Engineer
14 244 (2.88%) IT Technician
15 233 (2.75%) Architect
16 227 (2.68%) Software Engineer
16 227 (2.68%) Systems Engineer
17 221 (2.61%) Technical Support Engineer
18 220 (2.60%) Senior Developer
19 208 (2.46%) Administrator
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 392 (4.63%) .NET
2 286 (3.38%) Terraform
3 218 (2.58%) React
4 203 (2.40%) REST
5 191 (2.26%) HTML
6 143 (1.69%) CSS
7 142 (1.68%) RESTful
8 98 (1.16%) Node.js
9 96 (1.13%) Web Services
10 88 (1.04%) ASP.NET
11 85 (1.00%) SOAP
12 84 (0.99%) Spring
13 77 (0.91%) Spring Boot
14 75 (0.89%) Vue
15 74 (0.87%) Kafka
15 74 (0.87%) XML
16 72 (0.85%) AngularJS
16 72 (0.85%) Middleware
17 64 (0.76%) JSON
18 56 (0.66%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 817 (9.65%) Driving Licence
2 595 (7.03%) Onboarding
3 473 (5.59%) Self-Motivation
4 402 (4.75%) Management Information System
5 211 (2.49%) Cloud Native
6 185 (2.19%) Enterprise Software
6 185 (2.19%) Product Ownership
7 159 (1.88%) Robotics
8 155 (1.83%) Legacy Systems
9 135 (1.60%) Data Centre
10 97 (1.15%) NHS
11 93 (1.10%) CCTV
12 92 (1.09%) IoT
13 90 (1.06%) Cyber Threat
14 89 (1.05%) Distributed Systems
15 88 (1.04%) SCADA
16 85 (1.00%) Analytical Mindset
17 84 (0.99%) Social Media
18 83 (0.98%) Security Posture
19 80 (0.95%) FMCG
Operating Systems
1 1,271 (15.02%) Windows
2 549 (6.49%) Windows Server
3 455 (5.38%) Linux
4 125 (1.48%) Windows 10
5 104 (1.23%) Windows Server 2016
6 90 (1.06%) macOS
7 89 (1.05%) Apple iOS
8 85 (1.00%) Android
9 42 (0.50%) Windows Server 2019
10 37 (0.44%) Unix
11 28 (0.33%) Ubuntu
12 15 (0.18%) Embedded Linux
13 14 (0.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
13 14 (0.17%) VMS
14 13 (0.15%) Debian
15 9 (0.11%) Rocky
16 8 (0.095%) FreeRTOS
17 7 (0.083%) Windows Server 2012
18 6 (0.071%) CentOS
19 5 (0.059%) OpenVMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,354 (27.82%) Continuous Improvement
2 1,571 (18.56%) Customer Service
3 1,156 (13.66%) Agile
4 939 (11.10%) Stakeholder Management
5 908 (10.73%) Decision-Making
6 855 (10.10%) AI
7 821 (9.70%) Mentoring
8 773 (9.13%) CI/CD
9 740 (8.74%) Project Delivery
10 691 (8.16%) Collaborative Working
11 646 (7.63%) Cybersecurity
12 623 (7.36%) Analytics
12 623 (7.36%) DevOps
13 608 (7.18%) Software Engineering
14 598 (7.07%) ERP
15 587 (6.94%) ITIL
16 576 (6.81%) Project Management
17 547 (6.46%) Business Intelligence
18 543 (6.42%) Validation
19 522 (6.17%) CRM
Programming Languages
1 1,127 (13.32%) SQL
2 799 (9.44%) Python
3 463 (5.47%) C#
4 441 (5.21%) JavaScript
5 319 (3.77%) Java
6 314 (3.71%) PowerShell
7 216 (2.55%) C++
8 199 (2.35%) TypeScript
9 127 (1.50%) Bash
10 93 (1.10%) C
11 65 (0.77%) PHP
12 63 (0.74%) T-SQL
13 62 (0.73%) Data Analysis Expressions
14 58 (0.69%) MATLAB
15 56 (0.66%) Ruby
16 46 (0.54%) Shell Script
17 44 (0.52%) PL/SQL
17 44 (0.52%) Rust
18 40 (0.47%) Perl
19 37 (0.44%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,404 (16.59%) Degree
2 795 (9.39%) Security Cleared
3 554 (6.55%) SC Cleared
4 306 (3.62%) HNC
5 251 (2.97%) HND
6 249 (2.94%) DBS Check
7 208 (2.46%) Computer Science Degree
8 202 (2.39%) Microsoft Certification
9 194 (2.29%) DV Cleared
10 176 (2.08%) BPSS Clearance
11 156 (1.84%) Azure Certification
12 112 (1.32%) Chartered Engineer
13 99 (1.17%) NVQ Level 3
14 93 (1.10%) Cisco Certification
15 92 (1.09%) Master's Degree
16 75 (0.89%) A+ Certification
17 72 (0.85%) PMI Certification
18 69 (0.82%) City & Guilds
19 60 (0.71%) ACCA
19 60 (0.71%) CCNA
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 519 (6.13%) QA
2 316 (3.73%) Data Quality
3 237 (2.80%) Accessibility
4 236 (2.79%) GDPR
5 183 (2.16%) SLA
6 175 (2.07%) Cyber Essentials
7 138 (1.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 104 (1.23%) PCI DSS
9 67 (0.79%) NIST
10 61 (0.72%) ISO 9001
11 50 (0.59%) PMO
12 36 (0.43%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
13 24 (0.28%) DO-254
14 23 (0.27%) GMP
15 22 (0.26%) Actionable Recommendations
16 20 (0.24%) Good Clinical Practice
16 20 (0.24%) NCSC
17 14 (0.17%) GRC
17 14 (0.17%) GxP
17 14 (0.17%) NEBOSH
System Software
1 919 (10.86%) Active Directory
2 301 (3.56%) Hyper-V
3 278 (3.28%) Docker
4 217 (2.56%) VMware Infrastructure
5 97 (1.15%) Firmware
6 72 (0.85%) Terminal Server
7 46 (0.54%) Virtual Desktop
8 37 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
9 31 (0.37%) Embedded Firmware
10 25 (0.30%) vSphere
11 15 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
12 13 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
13 6 (0.071%) Microsoft Virtual Server
14 5 (0.059%) ClearTrust
14 5 (0.059%) Squid
15 4 (0.047%) KVM
16 3 (0.035%) Terminal Services
16 3 (0.035%) VMware Server
17 2 (0.024%) Samba
17 2 (0.024%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 297 (3.51%) Microsoft Intune
2 237 (2.80%) Kubernetes
3 104 (1.23%) Ansible
4 70 (0.83%) BMC PATROL
5 66 (0.78%) Grafana
6 56 (0.66%) SCCM
7 51 (0.60%) Prometheus
8 48 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
9 28 (0.33%) Jamf Pro
10 23 (0.27%) FortiGate
11 20 (0.24%) Functional Safety
12 17 (0.20%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
13 15 (0.18%) Nmap
13 15 (0.18%) Puppet
14 12 (0.14%) Nagios
15 11 (0.13%) Failover Clustering
15 11 (0.13%) Kibana
16 10 (0.12%) Progress Chef
16 10 (0.12%) Proxmox
17 9 (0.11%) logstash
Vendors
1 2,592 (30.63%) Microsoft
2 345 (4.08%) VMware
3 251 (2.97%) Google
4 238 (2.81%) SAP
5 221 (2.61%) Workday
6 181 (2.14%) Oracle
7 161 (1.90%) Cisco
8 148 (1.75%) Veeam
9 138 (1.63%) ServiceNow
10 125 (1.48%) Splunk
11 117 (1.38%) Salesforce
12 101 (1.19%) Sage
13 95 (1.12%) SolarWinds
14 84 (0.99%) Siemens
15 83 (0.98%) Fortinet
16 80 (0.95%) Tanium
17 75 (0.89%) Databricks
18 73 (0.86%) Brocade
18 73 (0.86%) Nimble Storage
19 72 (0.85%) Apple