Thought Leadership Job Trends

Thought Leadership
UK

The table below provides summary statistics and salary benchmarking for jobs requiring Thought Leadership skills. It covers permanent job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 14 September 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
14 Sep 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 333 242 463
Rank change year-on-year -91 +221 -195
Permanent jobs citing Thought Leadership 611 622 364
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.54% 1.26% 0.47%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.74% 1.42% 0.58%
Number of salaries quoted 273 158 190
10th Percentile £50,000 £44,625 £47,500
25th Percentile £63,750 £58,750 £64,063
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £90,000 £80,000 £80,000
Median % change year-on-year +12.50% - -
75th Percentile £111,250 £105,000 £97,500
90th Percentile £124,500 £120,000 £115,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £90,000 £65,000 £78,750
% change year-on-year +38.46% -17.46% -1.11%

All Process & Methodology Skills
UK

Thought Leadership 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.

Permanent vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 82,630 43,847 63,101
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 72.77% 88.67% 80.95%
Number of salaries quoted 57,445 24,695 36,468
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,500 £32,000
25th Percentile £41,750 £36,250 £42,500
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £57,500
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -4.35% -4.17%
75th Percentile £80,000 £75,000 £76,250
90th Percentile £100,000 £96,250 £95,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,500 £52,500
% change year-on-year +15.79% -9.52% -2.78%

Thought Leadership
Job Vacancy Trend

Historical trend showing the proportion of permanent IT job postings citing Thought Leadership relative to all permanent IT jobs advertised.

Thought Leadership job vacancy trend in the UK

Thought Leadership
Salary Trend

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Thought Leadership.

Salary distribution trend for jobs in the UK citing Thought Leadership

Thought Leadership
Salary Histogram

Salary distribution for jobs citing Thought Leadership over the 6 months to 14 September 2026.

Salary histogram for Thought Leadership in the UK

Thought Leadership
Top 17 Job Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median salaries quoted in IT jobs citing Thought Leadership within the UK over the 6 months to 14 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
England -80 551 £90,000 +12.50% 2,086
London -48 357 £100,000 +11.11% 1,575
UK excluding London -109 194 £90,000 +38.46% 732
Work from Home -9 143 £80,000 +23.08% 1,080
North of England -25 60 £95,000 +13.10% 215
Midlands -25 42 £80,000 +20.75% 64
North West -2 33 £95,000 +13.10% 170
South East -124 30 £77,500 +77.14% 99
West Midlands -27 26 £80,000 +30.61% 40
East of England - 21 £60,100 - 33
South West -69 19 £86,250 +7.81% 108
Wales -56 17 £55,000 +15.79% 10
East Midlands -16 16 £60,000 - 24
Yorkshire -23 16 £76,840 -9.60% 33
North East - 11 £100,000 - 12
Scotland -3 6 £110,000 +37.50% 135
Northern Ireland -82 1 - - 71

Thought Leadership
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities 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 12 (1.96%) Palantir Foundry
2 10 (1.64%) Microsoft Exchange
3 6 (0.98%) Confluence
4 4 (0.65%) Apache Spark
4 4 (0.65%) CMS
5 3 (0.49%) ArcGIS
5 3 (0.49%) SAS
6 2 (0.33%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (0.33%) Umbraco
7 1 (0.16%) Apache
7 1 (0.16%) Drupal
7 1 (0.16%) IIS
7 1 (0.16%) nginx
7 1 (0.16%) SharePoint
7 1 (0.16%) WordPress
Applications
1 6 (0.98%) Microsoft Excel
2 4 (0.65%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 3 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
3 3 (0.49%) MS Visio
Business Applications
1 24 (3.93%) SAP S/4HANA
2 6 (0.98%) Distributed Ledger
2 6 (0.98%) Oracle ERP
3 4 (0.65%) SAP MDG
3 4 (0.65%) SAP MDG-F
4 3 (0.49%) Dynamics CRM
4 3 (0.49%) SAP ERP
4 3 (0.49%) SAP MDG-BP
4 3 (0.49%) Summit
5 2 (0.33%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
5 2 (0.33%) SAP CO
5 2 (0.33%) SAP FI
5 2 (0.33%) SAP FI/CO
6 1 (0.16%) Magento
6 1 (0.16%) SAP IBP
6 1 (0.16%) SAP MDG-M
6 1 (0.16%) SAP MDG-S
Cloud Services
1 170 (27.82%) AWS
2 103 (16.86%) Azure
3 60 (9.82%) SaaS
4 53 (8.67%) GCP
5 35 (5.73%) Cloud Computing
6 32 (5.24%) AWS CloudFormation
7 23 (3.76%) Serverless
8 17 (2.78%) GitHub
8 17 (2.78%) Snowflake
9 16 (2.62%) Amazon Bedrock
9 16 (2.62%) Power Platform
10 13 (2.13%) Azure AI
11 9 (1.47%) Amazon ECS
11 9 (1.47%) Amazon EKS
11 9 (1.47%) Amazon S3
11 9 (1.47%) AWS Lambda
11 9 (1.47%) Azure DevOps
11 9 (1.47%) PaaS
12 8 (1.31%) GitHub Actions
12 8 (1.31%) Microsoft 365
Communications & Networking
1 13 (2.13%) Firewall
2 10 (1.64%) Internet
3 9 (1.47%) WAN
4 8 (1.31%) SD-WAN
4 8 (1.31%) Wireless
5 7 (1.15%) Broadband
5 7 (1.15%) Cisco ISE
5 7 (1.15%) Cisco Wireless
5 7 (1.15%) LAN
5 7 (1.15%) WebEx
5 7 (1.15%) WLAN
6 3 (0.49%) Network Security
7 2 (0.33%) AMQP
7 2 (0.33%) BGP
7 2 (0.33%) Intrusion Detection
7 2 (0.33%) MQTT
7 2 (0.33%) OSPF
7 2 (0.33%) SSL
7 2 (0.33%) VPN
8 1 (0.16%) SAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 28 (4.58%) NoSQL
2 20 (3.27%) Data Mining
3 19 (3.11%) Tableau
4 18 (2.95%) Data Warehouse
5 17 (2.78%) Amazon QuickSight
6 15 (2.45%) Data Lake
7 14 (2.29%) Power BI
8 11 (1.80%) Metadata
9 7 (1.15%) Big Data
10 5 (0.82%) Geospatial Data
10 5 (0.82%) SAP HANA
11 4 (0.65%) Amazon Redshift
11 4 (0.65%) BusinessObjects
11 4 (0.65%) Hadoop
11 4 (0.65%) Relational Database
12 3 (0.49%) Semantic Layer
12 3 (0.49%) SQL Server
12 3 (0.49%) SQL Server Analysis Services
13 2 (0.33%) Amazon RDS
13 2 (0.33%) Delta Lake
Development Applications
1 25 (4.09%) GitLab
2 23 (3.76%) Cucumber
3 9 (1.47%) Jenkins
4 7 (1.15%) Git
5 6 (0.98%) JIRA
5 6 (0.98%) Maven
6 4 (0.65%) Claude Code
6 4 (0.65%) MLflow
7 2 (0.33%) Ant
7 2 (0.33%) Apache Ivy
7 2 (0.33%) Balsamiq
7 2 (0.33%) IBM UrbanCode
7 2 (0.33%) rollup.js
7 2 (0.33%) Vite
8 1 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 1 (0.16%) Bitbucket
8 1 (0.16%) ERwin
8 1 (0.16%) JMeter
8 1 (0.16%) mountebank
8 1 (0.16%) Vagrant
General
1 245 (40.10%) Finance
2 197 (32.24%) Social Skills
3 140 (22.91%) Marketing
4 102 (16.69%) Public Sector
5 81 (13.26%) Analytical Skills
6 67 (10.97%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 59 (9.66%) Retail
8 52 (8.51%) Influencing Skills
9 47 (7.69%) Banking
10 43 (7.04%) Presentation Skills
11 36 (5.89%) Legal
12 26 (4.26%) Law
13 22 (3.60%) Brand Awareness
14 21 (3.44%) Back Office
15 18 (2.95%) Financial Institution
16 16 (2.62%) Manufacturing
16 16 (2.62%) Organisational Skills
16 16 (2.62%) Public Speaking
17 15 (2.45%) Aerospace
17 15 (2.45%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 126 (20.62%) Senior
2 122 (19.97%) Architect
3 68 (11.13%) Lead
4 63 (10.31%) Consultant
5 44 (7.20%) Senior Manager
6 36 (5.89%) Solutions Architect
7 33 (5.40%) Product Manager
8 30 (4.91%) Sales Executive
9 29 (4.75%) Senior Architect
10 24 (3.93%) Lead Architect
11 23 (3.76%) Java Engineer
11 23 (3.76%) Senior Product Manager
12 22 (3.60%) Principal Engineer
12 22 (3.60%) Principal Java Engineer
12 22 (3.60%) Security Architect
13 20 (3.27%) Digital Product Manager
13 20 (3.27%) Senior Consultant
13 20 (3.27%) Senior Digital Product Manager
14 19 (3.11%) Account Manager
14 19 (3.11%) Business Development Executive
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 31 (5.07%) Kafka
2 24 (3.93%) Spring
2 24 (3.93%) Spring Boot
3 20 (3.27%) Terraform
4 13 (2.13%) LangGraph
5 12 (1.96%) LangChain
6 9 (1.47%) FastAPI
7 6 (0.98%) CrewAI
7 6 (0.98%) Oracle Fusion
7 6 (0.98%) XML
8 5 (0.82%) Model Context Protocol
9 4 (0.65%) Middleware
9 4 (0.65%) PyTorch
9 4 (0.65%) RabbitMQ
9 4 (0.65%) React
9 4 (0.65%) TensorFlow
9 4 (0.65%) VML
10 3 (0.49%) CSS
10 3 (0.49%) OpenACC
10 3 (0.49%) OpenMP
Miscellaneous
1 83 (13.58%) Cloud Native
2 65 (10.64%) Onboarding
3 45 (7.36%) Enterprise Software
4 36 (5.89%) Blog
5 30 (4.91%) Distributed Systems
6 29 (4.75%) AI Agents
7 25 (4.09%) Product Ownership
8 24 (3.93%) e-Learning
8 24 (3.93%) Public Cloud
9 20 (3.27%) Social Media
10 14 (2.29%) Self-Motivation
10 14 (2.29%) Web Conferencing
11 13 (2.13%) Enterprise Cloud
12 12 (1.96%) Management Information System
12 12 (1.96%) NHS
13 11 (1.80%) Legacy Applications
14 9 (1.47%) Greenfield Project
14 9 (1.47%) Hackathon
15 8 (1.31%) Cyber Threat
15 8 (1.31%) Low-Code
Operating Systems
1 8 (1.31%) Windows
2 7 (1.15%) Linux
3 3 (0.49%) Windows Server
4 2 (0.33%) Solaris
4 2 (0.33%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 211 (34.53%) AI
2 181 (29.62%) Mentoring
3 171 (27.99%) Roadmaps
4 169 (27.66%) Business Development
5 143 (23.40%) Analytics
6 136 (22.26%) Stakeholder Management
7 132 (21.60%) Decision-Making
8 109 (17.84%) Agile
9 82 (13.42%) Continuous Improvement
10 78 (12.77%) CI/CD
11 76 (12.44%) Machine Learning
12 74 (12.11%) Coaching
12 74 (12.11%) Problem-Solving
13 72 (11.78%) Risk Management
14 70 (11.46%) DevOps
15 68 (11.13%) B2B
16 64 (10.47%) Infrastructure as Code
17 60 (9.82%) Technical Leadership
18 55 (9.00%) Strategic Thinking
19 51 (8.35%) Collaborative Culture
Programming Languages
1 73 (11.95%) Python
2 59 (9.66%) SQL
3 39 (6.38%) Java
4 11 (1.80%) R
5 7 (1.15%) PowerShell
6 5 (0.82%) Bash
7 3 (0.49%) Go
8 2 (0.33%) ABAP
8 2 (0.33%) Apex Code
8 2 (0.33%) Bicep
8 2 (0.33%) C#
8 2 (0.33%) Data Analysis Expressions
8 2 (0.33%) JavaScript
8 2 (0.33%) Scala
8 2 (0.33%) SOQL
8 2 (0.33%) SOSL
8 2 (0.33%) TypeScript
9 1 (0.16%) PHP
9 1 (0.16%) Ruby
9 1 (0.16%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 141 (23.08%) Degree
2 98 (16.04%) Security Cleared
3 68 (11.13%) SC Cleared
4 44 (7.20%) AWS Certification
5 26 (4.26%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 23 (3.76%) Master's Degree
7 18 (2.95%) CISSP
8 16 (2.62%) Computer Science Degree
9 15 (2.45%) BPSS Clearance
9 15 (2.45%) CISM
10 14 (2.29%) Azure Certification
11 12 (1.96%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
11 12 (1.96%) Postgraduate
12 11 (1.80%) DV Cleared
13 9 (1.47%) Cisco Certification
14 8 (1.31%) MBA
15 7 (1.15%) (ISC)2 CCSP
15 7 (1.15%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 7 (1.15%) CRISC
16 6 (0.98%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (4.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 23 (3.76%) GDPR
3 22 (3.60%) GRC
4 21 (3.44%) NIST
5 20 (3.27%) Data Quality
6 17 (2.78%) Accessibility
7 13 (2.13%) QA
7 13 (2.13%) SLA
8 11 (1.80%) PCI DSS
9 8 (1.31%) JSP 440
10 7 (1.15%) Basel III
11 6 (0.98%) HMG Security Policy Framework
12 5 (0.82%) Cyber Essentials
13 4 (0.65%) EU AI Act
13 4 (0.65%) PMO
14 3 (0.49%) IFRS
14 3 (0.49%) NCSC
14 3 (0.49%) SOC 2
15 2 (0.33%) Government Security Classifications
15 2 (0.33%) Solvency II
System Software
1 21 (3.44%) Docker
2 7 (1.15%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.49%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 1 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 29 (4.75%) Kubernetes
2 11 (1.80%) Ansible
3 6 (0.98%) Puppet
4 4 (0.65%) Argo
4 4 (0.65%) Progress Chef
5 3 (0.49%) Istio
5 3 (0.49%) Jamf Pro
5 3 (0.49%) Microsoft Intune
6 2 (0.33%) Salt
7 1 (0.16%) Amdocs OSS
7 1 (0.16%) AppManager
7 1 (0.16%) Consul
7 1 (0.16%) EMC NetWorker
7 1 (0.16%) FortiGate
7 1 (0.16%) Packer
7 1 (0.16%) RSA Archer
Vendors
1 63 (10.31%) Microsoft
2 40 (6.55%) Dell
3 38 (6.22%) SAP
4 28 (4.58%) Salesforce
5 27 (4.42%) Databricks
6 26 (4.26%) Google
7 17 (2.78%) Informatica
7 17 (2.78%) Oracle
7 17 (2.78%) ServiceNow
8 15 (2.45%) Foundry
9 13 (2.13%) Teradata
10 12 (1.96%) Denodo
10 12 (1.96%) Palantir
11 11 (1.80%) Cisco
12 10 (1.64%) HubSpot
12 10 (1.64%) Workday
13 9 (1.47%) OpenAI
14 8 (1.31%) Fortinet
15 7 (1.15%) Aruba
15 7 (1.15%) Juniper