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 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 358 265 459
Rank change year-on-year -93 +194 -206
Permanent jobs citing Thought Leadership 584 548 314
As % of all permanent jobs in the UK 0.49% 1.11% 0.43%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.67% 1.25% 0.53%
Number of salaries quoted 269 152 155
10th Percentile £52,400 £40,000 £48,750
25th Percentile £64,755 £58,750 £65,000
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £90,000 £80,000 £80,000
Median % change year-on-year +12.50% - -0.84%
75th Percentile £110,000 £107,813 £95,000
90th Percentile £117,500 £122,500 £110,000
UK excluding London median annual salary £90,000 £65,000 £80,000
% change year-on-year +38.46% -18.75% +0.46%

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 86,578 43,908 59,440
As % of all permanent jobs advertised in the UK 73.25% 88.94% 82.23%
Number of salaries quoted 59,120 24,542 31,807
10th Percentile £31,250 £28,250 £32,750
25th Percentile £41,250 £36,054 £43,750
Median annual salary (50th Percentile) £60,000 £55,000 £60,000
Median % change year-on-year +9.09% -8.33% -
75th Percentile £78,750 £75,000 £78,250
90th Percentile £100,000 £95,000 £97,500
UK excluding London median annual salary £55,000 £47,000 £52,500
% change year-on-year +17.02% -10.48% -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 11 October 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 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
England -100 509 £90,000 +12.50% 1,637
London -66 318 £95,000 -3.06% 1,163
UK excluding London -87 191 £90,000 +38.46% 550
Work from Home +10 143 £80,000 +23.08% 670
North of England -25 67 £90,000 +20.00% 192
Midlands -26 41 £90,000 +33.33% 64
North West 0 39 £85,250 +31.15% 122
South East -97 28 £105,000 +170.97% 101
West Midlands -39 24 £90,000 +38.46% 48
South West -60 23 £100,000 +56.64% 54
East Midlands -14 17 £60,000 -40.00% 16
Yorkshire -35 17 £90,000 +5.88% 41
Wales -59 16 - - 9
East of England -36 11 £60,100 +33.56% 32
North East - 11 £100,000 - 29
Scotland +3 9 £90,000 +20.81% 73
Northern Ireland -72 1 - - 28

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 6 (1.03%) Palantir Foundry
2 5 (0.86%) CMS
2 5 (0.86%) Confluence
2 5 (0.86%) Microsoft Exchange
3 3 (0.51%) Apache Spark
3 3 (0.51%) ArcGIS
3 3 (0.51%) SAS
4 2 (0.34%) Umbraco
4 2 (0.34%) WordPress
5 1 (0.17%) nginx
5 1 (0.17%) SharePoint
Applications
1 6 (1.03%) Microsoft Excel
2 5 (0.86%) Microsoft Office
3 3 (0.51%) Microsoft PowerPoint
3 3 (0.51%) MS Visio
4 1 (0.17%) Chatbot
Business Applications
1 24 (4.11%) SAP S/4HANA
2 6 (1.03%) Oracle ERP
3 5 (0.86%) Distributed Ledger
3 5 (0.86%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 3 (0.51%) Dynamics CRM
4 3 (0.51%) SAP ERP
4 3 (0.51%) SAP Oil and Gas
4 3 (0.51%) Summit
5 2 (0.34%) SAP CO
5 2 (0.34%) SAP FI
5 2 (0.34%) SAP FI/CO
5 2 (0.34%) SAP MDG
5 2 (0.34%) SAP MDG-BP
5 2 (0.34%) SAP MDG-F
5 2 (0.34%) SAP MM
6 1 (0.17%) SAP GRC
6 1 (0.17%) SAP IBP
Cloud Services
1 160 (27.40%) AWS
2 101 (17.29%) Azure
3 63 (10.79%) SaaS
4 46 (7.88%) GCP
5 34 (5.82%) AWS CloudFormation
6 32 (5.48%) Cloud Computing
7 19 (3.25%) Serverless
8 16 (2.74%) GitHub
9 15 (2.57%) Power Platform
10 14 (2.40%) Amazon Bedrock
11 11 (1.88%) Azure AI
12 10 (1.71%) Amazon ECS
13 9 (1.54%) AWS Lambda
13 9 (1.54%) PaaS
14 8 (1.37%) Amazon EKS
14 8 (1.37%) Amazon S3
14 8 (1.37%) Azure DevOps
15 7 (1.20%) LangSmith
15 7 (1.20%) Microsoft 365
16 6 (1.03%) Microsoft Purview
Communications & Networking
1 12 (2.05%) WAN
2 11 (1.88%) SD-WAN
2 11 (1.88%) Wireless
3 10 (1.71%) Broadband
3 10 (1.71%) Cisco ISE
3 10 (1.71%) Cisco Wireless
3 10 (1.71%) Internet
3 10 (1.71%) LAN
3 10 (1.71%) WebEx
3 10 (1.71%) WLAN
4 9 (1.54%) Firewall
5 2 (0.34%) AMQP
5 2 (0.34%) BGP
5 2 (0.34%) DNS
5 2 (0.34%) MQTT
5 2 (0.34%) Network Security
5 2 (0.34%) OSPF
5 2 (0.34%) VPN
6 1 (0.17%) F5 BIG-IP GTM
6 1 (0.17%) F5 BIG-IP LTM
Database & Business Intelligence
1 32 (5.48%) NoSQL
2 20 (3.42%) Data Mining
3 19 (3.25%) Tableau
4 17 (2.91%) Amazon QuickSight
5 15 (2.57%) Metadata
6 14 (2.40%) Power BI
7 7 (1.20%) Big Data
7 7 (1.20%) Relational Database
8 5 (0.86%) Data Warehouse
8 5 (0.86%) Metadata Repository
8 5 (0.86%) RDBMS
8 5 (0.86%) SAP HANA
8 5 (0.86%) Star Schema
9 4 (0.68%) Amazon Redshift
9 4 (0.68%) BusinessObjects
9 4 (0.68%) Geospatial Data
9 4 (0.68%) Hadoop
10 3 (0.51%) MongoDB
10 3 (0.51%) PostgreSQL
10 3 (0.51%) SQL Server Analysis Services
Development Applications
1 30 (5.14%) GitLab
2 26 (4.45%) Cucumber
3 9 (1.54%) Jenkins
4 6 (1.03%) Git
4 6 (1.03%) Maven
5 5 (0.86%) JIRA
6 4 (0.68%) Claude Code
6 4 (0.68%) MLflow
7 3 (0.51%) Vite
8 2 (0.34%) Ant
8 2 (0.34%) Apache Ivy
8 2 (0.34%) Balsamiq
8 2 (0.34%) IBM UrbanCode
9 1 (0.17%) Atlassian Bamboo
9 1 (0.17%) Bitbucket
9 1 (0.17%) ERwin
9 1 (0.17%) mountebank
9 1 (0.17%) rollup.js
General
1 259 (44.35%) Finance
2 206 (35.27%) Social Skills
3 151 (25.86%) Marketing
4 115 (19.69%) Public Sector
5 79 (13.53%) Analytical Skills
6 68 (11.64%) Inclusion and Diversity
7 57 (9.76%) Influencing Skills
8 49 (8.39%) Banking
9 46 (7.88%) Legal
10 37 (6.34%) Law
10 37 (6.34%) Retail
11 32 (5.48%) Presentation Skills
12 21 (3.60%) Back Office
13 18 (3.08%) Manufacturing
14 17 (2.91%) Financial Institution
15 16 (2.74%) Brand Awareness
15 16 (2.74%) Telecoms
16 14 (2.40%) Aerospace
16 14 (2.40%) Public Speaking
17 13 (2.23%) Military
Job Titles
1 120 (20.55%) Architect
2 105 (17.98%) Senior
3 75 (12.84%) Lead
4 53 (9.08%) Consultant
5 43 (7.36%) Senior Manager
6 37 (6.34%) Product Manager
7 30 (5.14%) Solutions Architect
8 29 (4.97%) Marketing Manager
9 28 (4.79%) Senior Architect
10 26 (4.45%) Java Engineer
10 26 (4.45%) Lead Architect
11 25 (4.28%) Principal Engineer
11 25 (4.28%) Principal Java Engineer
12 23 (3.94%) Senior Product Manager
13 22 (3.77%) Security Architect
14 20 (3.42%) Digital Product Manager
14 20 (3.42%) Senior Digital Product Manager
15 18 (3.08%) Data Architect
15 18 (3.08%) Lead Security Architect
16 17 (2.91%) Senior Consultant
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 30 (5.14%) Kafka
2 27 (4.62%) Spring
2 27 (4.62%) Spring Boot
3 19 (3.25%) Terraform
4 13 (2.23%) LangGraph
5 12 (2.05%) LangChain
6 10 (1.71%) FastAPI
7 6 (1.03%) CrewAI
7 6 (1.03%) Oracle Fusion
8 5 (0.86%) Model Context Protocol
9 4 (0.68%) Middleware
9 4 (0.68%) React
10 3 (0.51%) CSS
10 3 (0.51%) Next.js
10 3 (0.51%) OpenACC
10 3 (0.51%) OpenMP
10 3 (0.51%) pgvector
10 3 (0.51%) PyTorch
10 3 (0.51%) REST
10 3 (0.51%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 89 (15.24%) Cloud Native
2 65 (11.13%) Onboarding
3 43 (7.36%) Enterprise Software
4 36 (6.16%) Distributed Systems
5 32 (5.48%) AI Agents
6 31 (5.31%) Blog
7 27 (4.62%) Public Cloud
8 25 (4.28%) e-Learning
8 25 (4.28%) Social Media
8 25 (4.28%) Web Conferencing
9 20 (3.42%) Product Ownership
10 16 (2.74%) Self-Motivation
11 15 (2.57%) Management Information System
12 11 (1.88%) NHS
13 9 (1.54%) Cyber Threat
13 9 (1.54%) Greenfield Project
13 9 (1.54%) Hackathon
14 8 (1.37%) Enterprise Cloud
14 8 (1.37%) Low-Code
14 8 (1.37%) Taxonomies
Operating Systems
1 7 (1.20%) Windows
2 6 (1.03%) Linux
3 2 (0.34%) Solaris
3 2 (0.34%) Unix
3 2 (0.34%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 209 (35.79%) AI
2 175 (29.97%) Mentoring
3 169 (28.94%) Business Development
4 167 (28.60%) Stakeholder Management
5 166 (28.42%) Roadmaps
6 137 (23.46%) Analytics
7 116 (19.86%) Agile
8 100 (17.12%) Decision-Making
9 94 (16.10%) Coaching
10 79 (13.53%) CI/CD
10 79 (13.53%) Continuous Improvement
11 74 (12.67%) Machine Learning
12 73 (12.50%) B2B
13 69 (11.82%) Infrastructure as Code
13 69 (11.82%) Risk Management
14 68 (11.64%) Problem-Solving
15 64 (10.96%) Technical Leadership
16 63 (10.79%) DevOps
17 54 (9.25%) Collaborative Culture
17 54 (9.25%) CRM
Programming Languages
1 64 (10.96%) Python
1 64 (10.96%) SQL
2 36 (6.16%) Java
3 10 (1.71%) R
4 7 (1.20%) PowerShell
5 5 (0.86%) Bash
6 3 (0.51%) TypeScript
7 2 (0.34%) ABAP
7 2 (0.34%) Apex Code
7 2 (0.34%) Bicep
7 2 (0.34%) Data Analysis Expressions
7 2 (0.34%) Go
7 2 (0.34%) JavaScript
7 2 (0.34%) Scala
7 2 (0.34%) SOQL
7 2 (0.34%) SOSL
8 1 (0.17%) C#
8 1 (0.17%) Ruby
8 1 (0.17%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 109 (18.66%) Security Cleared
2 106 (18.15%) Degree
3 77 (13.18%) SC Cleared
4 47 (8.05%) AWS Certification
5 28 (4.79%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 23 (3.94%) Master's Degree
7 18 (3.08%) CISSP
8 15 (2.57%) Computer Science Degree
9 14 (2.40%) BPSS Clearance
10 13 (2.23%) CISM
11 12 (2.05%) Postgraduate
12 11 (1.88%) ISO 27001 Lead Auditor
13 8 (1.37%) Azure Certification
13 8 (1.37%) DV Cleared
13 8 (1.37%) MBA
14 7 (1.20%) Cisco Certification
15 6 (1.03%) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
16 5 (0.86%) (ISC)2 CCSP
16 5 (0.86%) CRISC
16 5 (0.86%) TOGAF Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 27 (4.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 21 (3.60%) NIST
3 20 (3.42%) GDPR
4 19 (3.25%) Data Quality
5 16 (2.74%) Accessibility
5 16 (2.74%) GRC
6 13 (2.23%) PCI DSS
7 11 (1.88%) QA
8 10 (1.71%) SLA
9 6 (1.03%) Basel III
9 6 (1.03%) Cyber Essentials
10 5 (0.86%) JSP 440
11 4 (0.68%) HMG Security Policy Framework
11 4 (0.68%) PMO
11 4 (0.68%) SOC 2
12 3 (0.51%) Cyber Essentials PLUS
12 3 (0.51%) NCSC
12 3 (0.51%) WCAG
13 2 (0.34%) NIST 800
13 2 (0.34%) RMADS
System Software
1 19 (3.25%) Docker
2 6 (1.03%) Active Directory
3 3 (0.51%) Slurm Workload Manager
Systems Management
1 29 (4.97%) Kubernetes
2 7 (1.20%) Ansible
3 4 (0.68%) Microsoft Intune
4 3 (0.51%) Istio
4 3 (0.51%) Jamf Pro
5 2 (0.34%) Argo
5 2 (0.34%) Progress Chef
5 2 (0.34%) Puppet
6 1 (0.17%) Amdocs OSS
6 1 (0.17%) AppManager
6 1 (0.17%) EMC NetWorker
6 1 (0.17%) FortiGate
6 1 (0.17%) RSA Archer
Vendors
1 63 (10.79%) Microsoft
2 42 (7.19%) SAP
3 24 (4.11%) Salesforce
4 23 (3.94%) Google
5 22 (3.77%) Oracle
6 15 (2.57%) Databricks
6 15 (2.57%) Workday
7 14 (2.40%) Cisco
7 14 (2.40%) HubSpot
8 11 (1.88%) Fortinet
8 11 (1.88%) ServiceNow
9 10 (1.71%) Aruba
9 10 (1.71%) Juniper
10 8 (1.37%) Foundry
10 8 (1.37%) OpenAI
11 6 (1.03%) Palantir
12 5 (0.86%) Marketo
13 4 (0.68%) Informatica
14 3 (0.51%) Apple
14 3 (0.51%) Guidewire