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 24 July 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
24 Jul 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 306 262 437
Rank change year-on-year -44 +175 -179
Permanent jobs citing Thought Leadership 611 572 486
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.61% 1.17% 0.53%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.83% 1.30% 0.65%
Number of salaries quoted 246 157 306
10th Percentile £44,750 £45,000 £36,250
25th Percentile £60,000 £57,500 £50,313
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £80,000 £82,500 £73,000
Median % change year-on-year -3.03% +13.01% -8.75%
75th Percentile £105,000 £105,000 £97,500
90th Percentile £117,500 £119,250 £130,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £70,000 £67,500 £70,000
% change year-on-year +3.70% -3.57% -

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 74,007 44,123 74,573
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.62% 89.89% 81.72%
Number of salaries quoted 51,106 24,962 50,806
10th Percentile £30,500 £28,750 £30,000
25th Percentile £41,250 £37,500 £40,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £55,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% - -8.71%
75th Percentile £78,750 £76,250 £73,750
90th Percentile £100,000 £97,500 £93,750
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £50,000 £50,000
% change year-on-year +10.00% - -9.09%

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 24 July 2026.

Salary histogram for Thought Leadership in the UK

Thought Leadership
Top 16 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 24 July 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 -46 562 £80,000 -0.93% 478
London -8 362 £95,000 +8.57% 365
UK excluding London -87 186 £70,000 +3.70% 150
Work from Home -11 137 £70,000 -17.65% 180
North of England -18 65 £95,000 +0.38% 38
East of England - 45 £60,100 - 8
North West +3 39 £95,000 +0.38% 26
Midlands -19 37 £80,000 +56.10% 11
South East -107 22 £37,500 -23.47% 52
West Midlands -34 20 £80,000 +56.10% 4
Yorkshire -26 18 £76,840 +2.45% 5
East Midlands -10 17 £50,000 - 7
South West -55 10 £59,750 -25.31% 16
North East -42 8 £100,000 +71.67% 7
Scotland +3 4 £110,000 +15.79% 9
Wales - 3 £55,000 - 6

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 16 (2.62%) Palantir Foundry
2 10 (1.64%) Microsoft Exchange
3 6 (0.98%) Apache Spark
4 5 (0.82%) CMS
5 3 (0.49%) Confluence
5 3 (0.49%) SAS
6 2 (0.33%) Apache Airflow
6 2 (0.33%) SharePoint
6 2 (0.33%) Umbraco
6 2 (0.33%) WordPress
7 1 (0.16%) Apache
7 1 (0.16%) ArcGIS
7 1 (0.16%) Drupal
7 1 (0.16%) IIS
7 1 (0.16%) nginx
Applications
1 8 (1.31%) Microsoft PowerPoint
2 3 (0.49%) Microsoft Excel
2 3 (0.49%) Microsoft Office
3 1 (0.16%) Adobe Creative Suite
3 1 (0.16%) Adobe XD
3 1 (0.16%) InVision
3 1 (0.16%) MS Visio
3 1 (0.16%) Sketch
3 1 (0.16%) Trello
Business Applications
1 25 (4.09%) SAP S/4HANA
2 5 (0.82%) Distributed Ledger
2 5 (0.82%) Dynamics CRM
2 5 (0.82%) SAP MDG
3 4 (0.65%) SAP MDG-F
4 3 (0.49%) SAP MDG-BP
4 3 (0.49%) Summit
5 2 (0.33%) Elite 3E
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%) NetSuite
6 1 (0.16%) SAP IBP
6 1 (0.16%) SAP MDG-M
6 1 (0.16%) SAP MDG-S
Cloud Services
1 156 (25.53%) AWS
2 91 (14.89%) Azure
3 66 (10.80%) SaaS
4 52 (8.51%) GCP
5 34 (5.56%) Cloud Computing
6 27 (4.42%) AWS CloudFormation
6 27 (4.42%) Snowflake
7 22 (3.60%) Serverless
8 14 (2.29%) GitHub
8 14 (2.29%) Power Platform
9 13 (2.13%) Amazon Bedrock
10 10 (1.64%) PaaS
11 9 (1.47%) Azure AI
12 7 (1.15%) Amazon EKS
12 7 (1.15%) Azure DevOps
12 7 (1.15%) GitHub Actions
13 6 (0.98%) Amazon ECS
13 6 (0.98%) Amazon S3
13 6 (0.98%) Microsoft 365
13 6 (0.98%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 18 (2.95%) Firewall
2 10 (1.64%) Internet
3 6 (0.98%) Intrusion Detection
3 6 (0.98%) Network Security
3 6 (0.98%) Wireless
4 5 (0.82%) Broadband
4 5 (0.82%) Cisco ISE
4 5 (0.82%) Cisco Wireless
4 5 (0.82%) LAN
4 5 (0.82%) SD-WAN
4 5 (0.82%) WAN
4 5 (0.82%) WebEx
4 5 (0.82%) WLAN
5 2 (0.33%) AMQP
5 2 (0.33%) Cisco IPT
5 2 (0.33%) MQTT
5 2 (0.33%) SSL
6 1 (0.16%) GoToMeeting
6 1 (0.16%) LoRaWAN
6 1 (0.16%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 31 (5.07%) Data Warehouse
2 29 (4.75%) Data Lake
3 23 (3.76%) NoSQL
4 13 (2.13%) Power BI
5 7 (1.15%) Big Data
6 6 (0.98%) SAP HANA
7 5 (0.82%) Metadata
8 4 (0.65%) BusinessObjects
8 4 (0.65%) Data Mining
8 4 (0.65%) Delta Lake
8 4 (0.65%) Hadoop
9 3 (0.49%) Amazon RDS
9 3 (0.49%) Semantic Layer
9 3 (0.49%) SQL Server Analysis Services
10 2 (0.33%) Amazon Redshift
10 2 (0.33%) Geospatial Data
10 2 (0.33%) SAP BW
10 2 (0.33%) SQL Server
10 2 (0.33%) Tableau
11 1 (0.16%) PostgreSQL
Development Applications
1 20 (3.27%) GitLab
2 19 (3.11%) Cucumber
3 8 (1.31%) MLflow
4 5 (0.82%) Git
4 5 (0.82%) Jenkins
4 5 (0.82%) Maven
5 4 (0.65%) Claude Code
6 3 (0.49%) JIRA
7 2 (0.33%) rollup.js
8 1 (0.16%) Ant
8 1 (0.16%) Apache Ivy
8 1 (0.16%) Atlassian Bamboo
8 1 (0.16%) Axure RP
8 1 (0.16%) Balsamiq
8 1 (0.16%) Gatling
8 1 (0.16%) IBM UrbanCode
8 1 (0.16%) JMeter
8 1 (0.16%) mountebank
8 1 (0.16%) Vagrant
8 1 (0.16%) Vite
General
1 201 (32.90%) Finance
2 164 (26.84%) Social Skills
3 112 (18.33%) Public Sector
4 110 (18.00%) Marketing
5 89 (14.57%) Analytical Skills
6 62 (10.15%) Retail
7 60 (9.82%) Presentation Skills
8 46 (7.53%) Banking
9 43 (7.04%) Inclusion and Diversity
10 39 (6.38%) Legal
11 36 (5.89%) Influencing Skills
12 20 (3.27%) Brand Awareness
13 17 (2.78%) Financial Institution
13 17 (2.78%) Law
14 15 (2.45%) Public Speaking
14 15 (2.45%) Telecoms
15 14 (2.29%) Manufacturing
16 13 (2.13%) Aerospace
16 13 (2.13%) Military
16 13 (2.13%) Organisational Skills
Job Titles
1 142 (23.24%) Senior
2 102 (16.69%) Architect
3 75 (12.27%) Consultant
4 73 (11.95%) Lead
5 52 (8.51%) Sales Executive
6 49 (8.02%) Account Executive
7 42 (6.87%) Senior Manager
8 33 (5.40%) Business Development Executive
9 32 (5.24%) Senior Sales Executive
10 30 (4.91%) Solutions Architect
11 27 (4.42%) Senior Account Executive
11 27 (4.42%) Senior Architect
12 26 (4.26%) Business Sales Executive
12 26 (4.26%) Sales Account Executive
13 24 (3.93%) Data Management Specialist
13 24 (3.93%) Product Manager
13 24 (3.93%) Product Specialist
14 22 (3.60%) Lead Architect
14 22 (3.60%) Senior Consultant
15 21 (3.44%) Account Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 30 (4.91%) Kafka
2 23 (3.76%) Spring
2 23 (3.76%) Spring Boot
3 9 (1.47%) LangGraph
4 8 (1.31%) LangChain
5 6 (0.98%) XML
6 5 (0.82%) CrewAI
6 5 (0.82%) FastAPI
6 5 (0.82%) Model Context Protocol
7 4 (0.65%) CSS
7 4 (0.65%) HTML
7 4 (0.65%) PySpark
7 4 (0.65%) PyTorch
7 4 (0.65%) RabbitMQ
7 4 (0.65%) React
7 4 (0.65%) REST
7 4 (0.65%) SOAP
7 4 (0.65%) TensorFlow
7 4 (0.65%) VML
8 3 (0.49%) OAuth2
Miscellaneous
1 63 (10.31%) Cloud Native
2 48 (7.86%) Onboarding
3 45 (7.36%) Enterprise Software
4 37 (6.06%) Blog
5 25 (4.09%) e-Learning
6 23 (3.76%) AI Agents
6 23 (3.76%) Distributed Systems
7 20 (3.27%) Product Ownership
7 20 (3.27%) Public Cloud
8 16 (2.62%) Management Information System
8 16 (2.62%) Social Media
9 15 (2.45%) Self-Motivation
9 15 (2.45%) Web Conferencing
10 14 (2.29%) NHS
11 12 (1.96%) Legacy Applications
12 11 (1.80%) Greenfield Project
13 10 (1.64%) Enterprise Cloud
13 10 (1.64%) Life Science
14 9 (1.47%) Data Fabric
14 9 (1.47%) Podcast
Operating Systems
1 6 (0.98%) Linux
1 6 (0.98%) Windows
2 2 (0.33%) Windows Server
3 1 (0.16%) Solaris
3 1 (0.16%) Unix
3 1 (0.16%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 214 (35.02%) AI
2 174 (28.48%) Business Development
3 169 (27.66%) Mentoring
4 160 (26.19%) Decision-Making
5 154 (25.20%) Roadmaps
6 144 (23.57%) Analytics
7 97 (15.88%) Agile
8 84 (13.75%) Stakeholder Management
9 77 (12.60%) Problem-Solving
10 74 (12.11%) B2B
11 73 (11.95%) Continuous Improvement
11 73 (11.95%) DevOps
12 67 (10.97%) CI/CD
13 66 (10.80%) Strategic Thinking
14 64 (10.47%) Coaching
15 63 (10.31%) Cybersecurity
16 62 (10.15%) Machine Learning
17 61 (9.98%) Business Strategy
18 58 (9.49%) Infrastructure as Code
19 57 (9.33%) Workshop Facilitation
Programming Languages
1 48 (7.86%) Python
2 42 (6.87%) Java
3 34 (5.56%) SQL
4 9 (1.47%) R
5 5 (0.82%) PowerShell
6 4 (0.65%) Bash
6 4 (0.65%) Go
7 3 (0.49%) C#
7 3 (0.49%) JavaScript
7 3 (0.49%) Kotlin
8 2 (0.33%) ABAP
8 2 (0.33%) Bicep
9 1 (0.16%) Data Analysis Expressions
9 1 (0.16%) PHP
9 1 (0.16%) Scala
9 1 (0.16%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 160 (26.19%) Degree
2 85 (13.91%) Security Cleared
3 54 (8.84%) SC Cleared
4 34 (5.56%) AWS Certification
5 22 (3.60%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
5 22 (3.60%) CISSP
6 20 (3.27%) CISM
6 20 (3.27%) Master's Degree
7 18 (2.95%) Computer Science Degree
8 14 (2.29%) Azure Certification
9 13 (2.13%) DV Cleared
9 13 (2.13%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
10 12 (1.96%) CRISC
11 11 (1.80%) DBS Check
12 10 (1.64%) BPSS Clearance
13 9 (1.47%) Cisco Certification
13 9 (1.47%) MBA
14 8 (1.31%) (ISC)2 CCSP
14 8 (1.31%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
15 6 (0.98%) GSEC
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 32 (5.24%) GRC
2 27 (4.42%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 21 (3.44%) NIST
4 19 (3.11%) GDPR
5 15 (2.45%) Accessibility
6 13 (2.13%) Data Quality
6 13 (2.13%) JSP 440
7 11 (1.80%) PCI DSS
7 11 (1.80%) SLA
8 10 (1.64%) QA
9 9 (1.47%) EU AI Act
9 9 (1.47%) HMG Security Policy Framework
10 7 (1.15%) Basel III
11 6 (0.98%) Government Security Classifications
12 5 (0.82%) Cyber Essentials
13 4 (0.65%) PMO
14 3 (0.49%) IFRS
14 3 (0.49%) NCSC
14 3 (0.49%) WCAG
15 2 (0.33%) GAAP
System Software
1 20 (3.27%) Docker
2 5 (0.82%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.49%) Slurm Workload Manager
4 1 (0.16%) Virtual Desktop
Systems Management
1 25 (4.09%) Kubernetes
2 18 (2.95%) Terraform
3 12 (1.96%) Ansible
4 6 (0.98%) Puppet
5 4 (0.65%) Argo
5 4 (0.65%) Progress Chef
6 2 (0.33%) Salt
7 1 (0.16%) Amdocs OSS
7 1 (0.16%) Consul
7 1 (0.16%) EMC NetWorker
7 1 (0.16%) Grafana
7 1 (0.16%) Packer
7 1 (0.16%) RSA Archer
Vendors
1 89 (14.57%) Dell
2 57 (9.33%) Microsoft
3 37 (6.06%) SAP
4 34 (5.56%) Databricks
5 28 (4.58%) Salesforce
6 25 (4.09%) Informatica
6 25 (4.09%) Teradata
7 24 (3.93%) Denodo
8 20 (3.27%) Google
8 20 (3.27%) ServiceNow
9 17 (2.78%) Foundry
10 16 (2.62%) Palantir
11 13 (2.13%) HubSpot
12 7 (1.15%) Cisco
12 7 (1.15%) Oracle
13 6 (0.98%) Cognizant
13 6 (0.98%) OpenAI
13 6 (0.98%) Workday
14 5 (0.82%) Ariba
14 5 (0.82%) Juniper