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 11 October 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Oct 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 6 4 4
Rank change year-on-year -2 0 +4
Permanent jobs citing Problem-Solving 8,213 6,216 7,747
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK excluding London 9.48% 18.00% 15.19%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 13.41% 20.66% 19.07%
Number of salaries quoted 5,519 3,505 2,916
10th Percentile £27,000 £25,684 £26,625
25th Percentile £31,250 £29,000 £34,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £43,000 £38,500 £50,000
Median % change year-on-year +11.69% -23.00% +5.26%
75th Percentile £58,750 £55,000 £65,000
90th Percentile £72,500 £68,750 £80,000
UK median annual salary £46,000 £45,000 £52,500
% change year-on-year +2.22% -14.29% -4.55%

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 61,235 30,094 40,614
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 70.68% 87.12% 79.65%
Number of salaries quoted 42,851 16,182 20,393
10th Percentile £30,000 £26,733 £31,000
25th Percentile £40,000 £32,000 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £55,000 £47,000 £52,500
Median % change year-on-year +17.02% -10.48% -2.78%
75th Percentile £70,000 £63,750 £68,000
90th Percentile £87,500 £80,000 £81,250
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 11 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 11 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 -6 2,063 £45,000 +1.12% 1,652
South East -1 1,926 £41,500 +3.75% 1,692
Midlands -6 1,476 £42,500 +13.33% 1,106
North West -2 1,069 £46,500 -4.56% 819
South West -2 998 £45,000 +20.00% 807
East of England -1 858 £44,000 +35.38% 833
West Midlands -5 828 £42,500 - 662
East Midlands -7 646 £42,500 +30.77% 444
Yorkshire -7 612 £42,500 +28.79% 578
North East +4 391 £50,000 +51.52% 271
Northern Ireland +8 339 £70,000 +16.67% 314
Scotland +5 330 £37,500 +11.94% 578
Wales -14 240 £42,500 -11.68% 204
Isle of Man 0 3 £35,000 - 9
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
1 476 (5.80%) SharePoint
2 364 (4.43%) Microsoft Exchange
3 66 (0.80%) Confluence
4 59 (0.72%) CMS
5 55 (0.67%) IIS
6 40 (0.49%) Apache
7 32 (0.39%) Apache Airflow
8 30 (0.37%) WordPress
9 28 (0.34%) Sitecore CMS
10 26 (0.32%) Apache Spark
11 14 (0.17%) Oracle Workflow
12 13 (0.16%) Jupyter
13 12 (0.15%) nginx
14 10 (0.12%) WebSphere
15 9 (0.11%) WebLogic
16 8 (0.097%) CICS
16 8 (0.097%) SAS
17 7 (0.085%) OpenEdge
18 4 (0.049%) Headless CMS
18 4 (0.049%) Oracle SOA Suite
Applications
1 613 (7.46%) Microsoft Office
2 559 (6.81%) Microsoft Excel
3 89 (1.08%) Microsoft PowerPoint
4 62 (0.75%) Spreadsheet
5 51 (0.62%) AutoCAD
6 46 (0.56%) MS Visio
7 40 (0.49%) Microsoft Project
7 40 (0.49%) Simulink
8 29 (0.35%) Revit
9 23 (0.28%) EPLAN
10 16 (0.19%) SOLIDWORKS
11 12 (0.15%) Navisworks
11 12 (0.15%) OrCAD
12 9 (0.11%) Adobe Creative Suite
13 8 (0.097%) Chatbot
14 7 (0.085%) Lightworks
14 7 (0.085%) Siemens NX
15 5 (0.061%) Adobe Illustrator
15 5 (0.061%) Adobe XD
15 5 (0.061%) Mathematica
Business Applications
1 74 (0.90%) Dynamics CRM
2 62 (0.75%) NetSuite
3 45 (0.55%) SAP S/4HANA
4 33 (0.40%) Shopify
5 22 (0.27%) Oracle EBS
6 21 (0.26%) Workday HCM
7 18 (0.22%) Dynamics NAV
8 15 (0.18%) Oracle Payables
9 14 (0.17%) Salesforce CRM
9 14 (0.17%) SAP Business One
10 12 (0.15%) IBM Planning Analytics
10 12 (0.15%) Oracle Cash Management
10 12 (0.15%) Oracle Subledger Accounting
10 12 (0.15%) SAP ERP
11 11 (0.13%) Dynamics AX
11 11 (0.13%) Payment Gateway
12 10 (0.12%) JDE EnterpriseOne
13 9 (0.11%) Magento
13 9 (0.11%) Sage 50
13 9 (0.11%) Sage X3
Cloud Services
1 1,434 (17.46%) Azure
2 1,313 (15.99%) Microsoft 365
3 697 (8.49%) AWS
4 618 (7.52%) Power Platform
5 473 (5.76%) Entra ID
6 299 (3.64%) SaaS
7 234 (2.85%) GCP
8 176 (2.14%) Azure DevOps
9 156 (1.90%) PowerApps
10 155 (1.89%) GitHub
11 148 (1.80%) Dynamics 365
12 146 (1.78%) Power Automate
13 132 (1.61%) OneDrive
14 114 (1.39%) Serverless
15 100 (1.22%) Microsoft Copilot
16 83 (1.01%) Google Workspace
17 71 (0.86%) Amazon S3
18 68 (0.83%) AWS CloudFormation
18 68 (0.83%) GitHub Actions
19 57 (0.69%) AWS Lambda
Communications & Networking
1 461 (5.61%) DNS
2 460 (5.60%) Firewall
3 380 (4.63%) DHCP
4 299 (3.64%) VPN
5 242 (2.95%) TCP/IP
6 215 (2.62%) Wi-Fi
7 203 (2.47%) WAN
8 199 (2.42%) LAN
9 181 (2.20%) Wireless
10 157 (1.91%) VLAN
11 131 (1.60%) Network Security
12 113 (1.38%) VoIP
13 67 (0.82%) Internet
14 65 (0.79%) Broadband
15 32 (0.39%) Remote Desktop
15 32 (0.39%) SAN
16 31 (0.38%) SSL
17 28 (0.34%) 5G
17 28 (0.34%) Ethernet
18 27 (0.33%) SD-WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 486 (5.92%) Power BI
2 334 (4.07%) SQL Server
3 137 (1.67%) MySQL
4 129 (1.57%) Relational Database
5 123 (1.50%) Amazon RDS
6 109 (1.33%) Data Warehouse
7 98 (1.19%) PostgreSQL
8 85 (1.03%) NoSQL
9 65 (0.79%) SQL Server Reporting Services
9 65 (0.79%) Tableau
10 56 (0.68%) MongoDB
11 53 (0.65%) Data Lake
12 52 (0.63%) Power Query
13 51 (0.62%) Big Data
14 50 (0.61%) Azure SQL Database
15 49 (0.60%) SQL Server Integration Services
16 47 (0.57%) Electronic Patient Records
17 35 (0.43%) Metadata
18 33 (0.40%) Oracle Reports
19 27 (0.33%) Amazon Redshift
Development Applications
1 321 (3.91%) Git
2 246 (3.00%) JIRA
3 104 (1.27%) GitLab
4 94 (1.14%) Jenkins
5 40 (0.49%) Eclipse
6 38 (0.46%) Selenium
7 34 (0.41%) Cucumber
7 34 (0.41%) Subversion
8 31 (0.38%) Claude Code
9 26 (0.32%) JUnit
10 25 (0.30%) Cypress.io
10 25 (0.30%) Oracle Forms
11 23 (0.28%) Postman
12 22 (0.27%) LabVIEW
13 21 (0.26%) Rational DOORS
14 20 (0.24%) Bitbucket
15 16 (0.19%) Burp Suite
16 14 (0.17%) SonarQube
16 14 (0.17%) Team Foundation Server
17 13 (0.16%) Metasploit
General
1 4,039 (49.18%) Social Skills
2 2,267 (27.60%) Analytical Skills
3 1,315 (16.01%) Finance
4 1,008 (12.27%) Manufacturing
5 689 (8.39%) Organisational Skills
6 456 (5.55%) Retail
7 446 (5.43%) Inclusion and Diversity
8 386 (4.70%) Public Sector
9 382 (4.65%) Electronics
10 337 (4.10%) Aerospace
11 336 (4.09%) Legal
12 333 (4.05%) Law
13 295 (3.59%) Marketing
14 208 (2.53%) Telecoms
15 160 (1.95%) Influencing Skills
16 153 (1.86%) Automotive
17 144 (1.75%) Documentation Skills
18 127 (1.55%) Presentation Skills
19 114 (1.39%) Banking
20 108 (1.31%) Military
Job Titles
1 1,087 (13.24%) Analyst
2 845 (10.29%) Senior
3 771 (9.39%) IT Support
4 732 (8.91%) Developer
5 601 (7.32%) Support Engineer
6 419 (5.10%) Lead
6 419 (5.10%) Support Analyst
7 390 (4.75%) IT Engineer
8 362 (4.41%) Consultant
9 302 (3.68%) IT Support Engineer
10 295 (3.59%) Technical Support
11 267 (3.25%) Support Technician
12 250 (3.04%) Technical Engineer
13 244 (2.97%) IT Technician
14 230 (2.80%) Architect
15 225 (2.74%) Technical Support Engineer
16 224 (2.73%) Software Engineer
17 220 (2.68%) Systems Engineer
18 213 (2.59%) Senior Developer
19 197 (2.40%) Administrator
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 381 (4.64%) .NET
2 288 (3.51%) Terraform
3 219 (2.67%) React
4 197 (2.40%) REST
5 188 (2.29%) HTML
6 141 (1.72%) CSS
7 138 (1.68%) RESTful
8 97 (1.18%) Node.js
9 94 (1.14%) Web Services
10 87 (1.06%) ASP.NET
10 87 (1.06%) SOAP
11 83 (1.01%) Spring
12 78 (0.95%) Vue
13 76 (0.93%) Spring Boot
14 74 (0.90%) XML
15 72 (0.88%) AngularJS
15 72 (0.88%) Kafka
16 71 (0.86%) Middleware
17 65 (0.79%) JSON
18 54 (0.66%) Playwright
Miscellaneous
1 784 (9.55%) Driving Licence
2 586 (7.14%) Onboarding
3 447 (5.44%) Self-Motivation
4 385 (4.69%) Management Information System
5 212 (2.58%) Cloud Native
6 179 (2.18%) Enterprise Software
7 178 (2.17%) Product Ownership
8 154 (1.88%) Legacy Systems
9 152 (1.85%) Robotics
10 135 (1.64%) Data Centre
11 97 (1.18%) NHS
12 89 (1.08%) Analytical Mindset
12 89 (1.08%) Cyber Threat
13 88 (1.07%) IoT
14 87 (1.06%) Distributed Systems
15 86 (1.05%) CCTV
16 83 (1.01%) Security Posture
17 81 (0.99%) Social Media
18 78 (0.95%) SCADA
19 73 (0.89%) FMCG
Operating Systems
1 1,242 (15.12%) Windows
2 542 (6.60%) Windows Server
3 447 (5.44%) Linux
4 125 (1.52%) Windows 10
5 103 (1.25%) Windows Server 2016
6 89 (1.08%) Apple iOS
7 87 (1.06%) macOS
8 86 (1.05%) Android
9 41 (0.50%) Windows Server 2019
10 36 (0.44%) Unix
11 26 (0.32%) Ubuntu
12 15 (0.18%) Embedded Linux
13 14 (0.17%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
13 14 (0.17%) VMS
14 12 (0.15%) Debian
15 8 (0.097%) FreeRTOS
15 8 (0.097%) Rocky
16 7 (0.085%) Windows Server 2012
17 6 (0.073%) CentOS
18 5 (0.061%) Windows 7
Processes & Methodologies
1 2,257 (27.48%) Continuous Improvement
2 1,529 (18.62%) Customer Service
3 1,131 (13.77%) Agile
4 882 (10.74%) Stakeholder Management
5 872 (10.62%) Decision-Making
6 827 (10.07%) AI
7 799 (9.73%) Mentoring
8 754 (9.18%) CI/CD
9 717 (8.73%) Project Delivery
10 664 (8.08%) Collaborative Working
11 634 (7.72%) Cybersecurity
12 606 (7.38%) DevOps
13 605 (7.37%) Analytics
14 601 (7.32%) Software Engineering
15 585 (7.12%) ERP
16 577 (7.03%) ITIL
17 566 (6.89%) Project Management
18 533 (6.49%) Business Intelligence
19 514 (6.26%) Validation
20 511 (6.22%) CRM
Programming Languages
1 1,109 (13.50%) SQL
2 791 (9.63%) Python
3 454 (5.53%) C#
4 436 (5.31%) JavaScript
5 320 (3.90%) Java
6 309 (3.76%) PowerShell
7 216 (2.63%) C++
8 201 (2.45%) TypeScript
9 127 (1.55%) Bash
10 89 (1.08%) C
11 64 (0.78%) PHP
12 62 (0.75%) Data Analysis Expressions
13 59 (0.72%) T-SQL
14 56 (0.68%) MATLAB
15 54 (0.66%) Ruby
16 46 (0.56%) Shell Script
17 45 (0.55%) PL/SQL
17 45 (0.55%) Rust
18 41 (0.50%) Perl
19 37 (0.45%) Go
Qualifications
1 1,355 (16.50%) Degree
2 781 (9.51%) Security Cleared
3 543 (6.61%) SC Cleared
4 284 (3.46%) HNC
5 237 (2.89%) DBS Check
6 234 (2.85%) HND
7 206 (2.51%) Computer Science Degree
8 196 (2.39%) Microsoft Certification
9 194 (2.36%) DV Cleared
10 172 (2.09%) BPSS Clearance
11 147 (1.79%) Azure Certification
12 109 (1.33%) Chartered Engineer
13 92 (1.12%) Cisco Certification
14 91 (1.11%) NVQ Level 3
15 88 (1.07%) Master's Degree
16 72 (0.88%) A+ Certification
17 70 (0.85%) PMI Certification
18 64 (0.78%) City & Guilds
19 59 (0.72%) CCNA
20 58 (0.71%) CISSP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 501 (6.10%) QA
2 308 (3.75%) Data Quality
3 231 (2.81%) GDPR
4 220 (2.68%) Accessibility
5 184 (2.24%) SLA
6 172 (2.09%) Cyber Essentials
7 134 (1.63%) ISO/IEC 27001
8 104 (1.27%) PCI DSS
9 68 (0.83%) NIST
10 55 (0.67%) ISO 9001
11 49 (0.60%) PMO
12 35 (0.43%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
13 23 (0.28%) DO-254
14 22 (0.27%) GMP
15 20 (0.24%) Good Clinical Practice
15 20 (0.24%) NCSC
16 19 (0.23%) Actionable Recommendations
17 14 (0.17%) GRC
17 14 (0.17%) GxP
18 13 (0.16%) Def Stans
System Software
1 902 (10.98%) Active Directory
2 300 (3.65%) Hyper-V
3 273 (3.32%) Docker
4 216 (2.63%) VMware Infrastructure
5 88 (1.07%) Firmware
6 72 (0.88%) Terminal Server
7 47 (0.57%) Virtual Desktop
8 36 (0.44%) Virtual Machines
9 31 (0.38%) Embedded Firmware
10 26 (0.32%) vSphere
11 15 (0.18%) VMware ESXi
12 12 (0.15%) Virtual Servers
13 5 (0.061%) ClearTrust
13 5 (0.061%) Microsoft Virtual Server
13 5 (0.061%) Squid
14 4 (0.049%) KVM
15 3 (0.037%) Terminal Services
15 3 (0.037%) VMware Server
16 2 (0.024%) Samba
16 2 (0.024%) XenApp
Systems Management
1 283 (3.45%) Microsoft Intune
2 234 (2.85%) Kubernetes
3 106 (1.29%) Ansible
4 70 (0.85%) BMC PATROL
5 67 (0.82%) Grafana
6 55 (0.67%) SCCM
7 50 (0.61%) Prometheus
8 47 (0.57%) Single Sign-On
9 25 (0.30%) Jamf Pro
10 22 (0.27%) FortiGate
11 20 (0.24%) Functional Safety
12 16 (0.19%) Systems Management Server (SMS)
13 15 (0.18%) Puppet
14 13 (0.16%) Kibana
14 13 (0.16%) Nmap
15 11 (0.13%) logstash
15 11 (0.13%) Nagios
16 10 (0.12%) Failover Clustering
16 10 (0.12%) Progress Chef
16 10 (0.12%) Proxmox
Vendors
1 2,503 (30.48%) Microsoft
2 345 (4.20%) VMware
3 242 (2.95%) Google
4 231 (2.81%) SAP
5 216 (2.63%) Workday
6 177 (2.16%) Oracle
7 154 (1.88%) Cisco
8 148 (1.80%) Veeam
9 130 (1.58%) ServiceNow
10 126 (1.53%) Splunk
11 115 (1.40%) Salesforce
12 101 (1.23%) Sage
13 96 (1.17%) SolarWinds
14 82 (1.00%) Fortinet
15 80 (0.97%) Tanium
16 79 (0.96%) Siemens
17 75 (0.91%) Databricks
18 73 (0.89%) Brocade
18 73 (0.89%) Nimble Storage
19 70 (0.85%) Apple