Critical Thinking Contracts

Critical Thinking
UK

The following table provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies with a requirement for Critical Thinking skills. Included is a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that have cited Critical Thinking over the 6 months to 27 April 2024 with a comparison to the same period in the previous 2 years.

6 months to
27 Apr 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 380 439 464
Rank change year-on-year +59 +25 -6
Contract jobs citing Critical Thinking 225 297 444
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.52% 0.50% 0.50%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.60% 0.55% 0.55%
Number of daily rates quoted 147 196 276
10th Percentile £254 £350 £350
25th Percentile £385 £408 £413
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £525 £500
Median % change year-on-year - +5.00% +3.09%
75th Percentile £625 £606 £613
90th Percentile £750 £838 £700
UK excluding London median daily rate £525 £468 £480
% change year-on-year +12.30% -2.60% +8.84%
Number of hourly rates quoted 9 20 5
10th Percentile £22.14 £20.10 £47.00
25th Percentile £25.09 £20.22 £49.25
Median hourly rate £26.00 £21.67 £53.50
Median % change year-on-year +19.98% -59.50% +24.42%
75th Percentile £35.00 £37.12 £69.05
90th Percentile £45.00 £50.42 -
UK excluding London median hourly rate £30.18 £20.71 £61.28
% change year-on-year +45.76% -66.21% +42.50%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Critical Thinking is in the Processes and Methodologies category. The following table is for comparison with the above and provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 37,374 53,774 80,482
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 86.31% 89.91% 90.60%
Number of daily rates quoted 24,095 37,304 56,474
10th Percentile £300 £325 £340
25th Percentile £413 £438 £425
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £525
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +4.76% +8.25%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £638
90th Percentile £750 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £475
% change year-on-year - +5.26% +9.20%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,422 1,763 1,928
10th Percentile £12.75 £11.00 £12.50
25th Percentile £16.00 £16.25 £15.25
Median hourly rate £35.00 £37.34 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year -6.27% +49.36% -
75th Percentile £59.44 £65.00 £49.25
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.00 £63.75
UK excluding London median hourly rate £36.00 £36.00 £20.00
% change year-on-year - +80.00% -8.17%

Critical Thinking
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Critical Thinking as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Critical Thinking.

Daily rate trend for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Critical Thinking over the 6 months to 27 April 2024.

Daily rate histogram for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Critical Thinking.

Hourly rate trend for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Critical Thinking over the 6 months to 27 April 2024.

Hourly rate histogram for Critical Thinking in the UK

Critical Thinking
Top 16 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Critical Thinking within the UK over the 6 months to 27 April 2024. 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
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
England +64 191 £525 - 226
UK excluding London +74 123 £525 +12.30% 140
London +37 81 £563 +1.12% 101
Work from Home +81 64 £425 -16.26% 104
Midlands +32 30 £275 -21.43% 18
North of England +34 21 £579 +5.27% 37
South East +11 21 £538 +34.38% 37
East Midlands +33 19 £269 -10.71% 8
North West +20 17 £548 +10.99% 21
South West +10 17 £538 -2.27% 19
Wales +26 13 £600 +9.09% 4
Scotland +34 11 £450 +12.50% 10
West Midlands +26 11 £607 +73.43% 10
East of England - 9 £500 - 14
Yorkshire +18 4 £650 +13.04% 14
Northern Ireland - 1 £325 - 3

Critical Thinking
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 27 (12.00%) Confluence
2 22 (9.78%) Microsoft Exchange
3 21 (9.33%) SharePoint
4 6 (2.67%) SAS
5 3 (1.33%) Apache Airflow
5 3 (1.33%) Jupyter
5 3 (1.33%) nginx
6 2 (0.89%) Skype for Business
7 1 (0.44%) IBM Domino
7 1 (0.44%) IBM Notes
Applications
1 23 (10.22%) Microsoft Office
2 17 (7.56%) Microsoft Excel
3 8 (3.56%) Acrobat
4 4 (1.78%) Spreadsheet
5 2 (0.89%) Microsoft Project
6 1 (0.44%) Adobe XD
6 1 (0.44%) Microsoft PowerPoint
6 1 (0.44%) MS Visio
6 1 (0.44%) Sketch
Business Applications
1 4 (1.78%) Oracle Cash Management
1 4 (1.78%) Oracle Receivables
1 4 (1.78%) SAP S/4HANA
2 3 (1.33%) SAP SD
3 2 (0.89%) SAP ERP
4 1 (0.44%) Distributed Ledger
4 1 (0.44%) OpenText VIM for SAP
4 1 (0.44%) Oracle Procure-to-Pay
4 1 (0.44%) SAP CO
4 1 (0.44%) SAP FI
4 1 (0.44%) SAP FI/CO
4 1 (0.44%) SAP MM
4 1 (0.44%) SAP SCM
Cloud Services
1 29 (12.89%) Azure
2 14 (6.22%) Azure DevOps
3 13 (5.78%) AWS
4 9 (4.00%) GCP
4 9 (4.00%) Microsoft 365
5 8 (3.56%) PaaS
5 8 (3.56%) Power Platform
6 7 (3.11%) Azure App Service
7 5 (2.22%) Azure AKS
8 4 (1.78%) Azure Monitor
8 4 (1.78%) Cloud Computing
8 4 (1.78%) IaaS
8 4 (1.78%) OCI
8 4 (1.78%) SaaS
9 3 (1.33%) CloudBees
9 3 (1.33%) Entra ID
9 3 (1.33%) Google Kubernetes Engine
9 3 (1.33%) Power Automate
9 3 (1.33%) PowerApps
9 3 (1.33%) Snowflake
Communications & Networking
1 24 (10.67%) DNS
2 17 (7.56%) DHCP
3 9 (4.00%) VSAN
4 7 (3.11%) Firewall
5 5 (2.22%) Intranet
5 5 (2.22%) TCP/IP
5 5 (2.22%) VPN
6 4 (1.78%) HTTP
6 4 (1.78%) Internet
6 4 (1.78%) Kerberos
6 4 (1.78%) SSH
7 3 (1.33%) Unified Communications
8 2 (0.89%) Skype
8 2 (0.89%) SSL
9 1 (0.44%) BGP
9 1 (0.44%) Cisco Nexus
9 1 (0.44%) LAN
9 1 (0.44%) OSPF
9 1 (0.44%) SMTP
9 1 (0.44%) Software-Defined Networking
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (4.44%) MongoDB
2 8 (3.56%) Power BI
3 7 (3.11%) Relational Database
4 5 (2.22%) KDB
5 4 (1.78%) Oracle Reports
5 4 (1.78%) SAP HANA
6 3 (1.33%) Amazon Redshift
6 3 (1.33%) Apache Cassandra
6 3 (1.33%) Big Data
6 3 (1.33%) ClickHouse
6 3 (1.33%) Hadoop
6 3 (1.33%) NoSQL
7 2 (0.89%) Geospatial Data
7 2 (0.89%) Snowflake Schema
7 2 (0.89%) Tableau
8 1 (0.44%) Data Warehouse
8 1 (0.44%) MS Access
8 1 (0.44%) MySQL
8 1 (0.44%) RDBMS
8 1 (0.44%) SQL Navigator
Development Applications
1 31 (13.78%) JIRA
2 7 (3.11%) Git
3 4 (1.78%) Cypress.io
4 3 (1.33%) Jenkins
5 2 (0.89%) Bitbucket
5 2 (0.89%) Selenium
6 1 (0.44%) Balsamiq
6 1 (0.44%) GoCD
6 1 (0.44%) Gradle
6 1 (0.44%) IntelliJ
6 1 (0.44%) JUnit
6 1 (0.44%) Oracle Forms
6 1 (0.44%) TeamCity
6 1 (0.44%) Toad
General
1 161 (71.56%) Social Skills
2 103 (45.78%) Analytical Skills
3 55 (24.44%) Finance
4 26 (11.56%) Organisational Skills
4 26 (11.56%) Public Sector
5 17 (7.56%) Marketing
6 16 (7.11%) Military
7 14 (6.22%) Presentation Skills
8 12 (5.33%) Telecoms
9 10 (4.44%) French Language
10 9 (4.00%) Banking
10 9 (4.00%) German Language
10 9 (4.00%) Local Government
11 8 (3.56%) Influencing Skills
12 6 (2.67%) Inclusion and Diversity
12 6 (2.67%) Legal
13 5 (2.22%) Front Office
14 4 (1.78%) Arabic Language
14 4 (1.78%) Spanish Language
15 3 (1.33%) Manufacturing
Job Titles
1 49 (21.78%) Analyst
2 31 (13.78%) Senior
3 20 (8.89%) Project Manager
4 19 (8.44%) Developer
5 15 (6.67%) Integration Engineer
5 15 (6.67%) Test and Integration Engineer
5 15 (6.67%) Test Engineer
6 12 (5.33%) Business Analyst
7 11 (4.89%) Senior Manager
8 9 (4.00%) Infrastructure Engineer
9 8 (3.56%) Bid Manager
9 8 (3.56%) Java Developer
9 8 (3.56%) Senior Analyst
9 8 (3.56%) Senior Bid Manager
9 8 (3.56%) Software Engineer
10 7 (3.11%) Architect
10 7 (3.11%) SAP Analyst
10 7 (3.11%) Virtualisation Engineer
11 6 (2.67%) Consultant
11 6 (2.67%) Integration Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 10 (4.44%) .NET
2 9 (4.00%) Spring
3 8 (3.56%) HTML
3 8 (3.56%) LDAP
4 7 (3.11%) Node.js
5 6 (2.67%) CSS
5 6 (2.67%) Flash
5 6 (2.67%) JSON
5 6 (2.67%) RESTful
6 5 (2.22%) AngularJS
7 4 (1.78%) Kafka
7 4 (1.78%) React
7 4 (1.78%) scikit-learn
8 3 (1.33%) Django
8 3 (1.33%) Flask
8 3 (1.33%) Hibernate
8 3 (1.33%) OAuth
8 3 (1.33%) OpenID
8 3 (1.33%) Regular Expression
8 3 (1.33%) XACML
Miscellaneous
1 26 (11.56%) Self-Motivation
2 19 (8.44%) PKI
3 15 (6.67%) Management Information System
4 10 (4.44%) Enterprise Software
4 10 (4.44%) Product Ownership
4 10 (4.44%) Virtual Team
5 7 (3.11%) Algorithms
6 6 (2.67%) Clustering
7 5 (2.22%) Data Structures
7 5 (2.22%) Derivative
7 5 (2.22%) Fixed Income
8 4 (1.78%) Video Conferencing
9 3 (1.33%) Cyber Kill Chain
9 3 (1.33%) Operational Technology
10 2 (0.89%) Blockchain
10 2 (0.89%) Data Centre
10 2 (0.89%) Distributed Applications
10 2 (0.89%) FMCG
10 2 (0.89%) Low-Code
10 2 (0.89%) Security Operations Centre
Operating Systems
1 25 (11.11%) Windows
2 18 (8.00%) Windows Server
3 17 (7.56%) Windows Server 2012
4 13 (5.78%) Linux
5 6 (2.67%) Windows 10
6 5 (2.22%) Android
7 4 (1.78%) Apple iOS
8 2 (0.89%) Windows 7
9 1 (0.44%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 123 (54.67%) Problem-Solving
2 79 (35.11%) Agile
3 50 (22.22%) Project Management
4 33 (14.67%) Decision-Making
5 31 (13.78%) Computer Science
6 29 (12.89%) Stakeholder Management
6 29 (12.89%) Time Management
7 27 (12.00%) Continuous Improvement
8 25 (11.11%) Analytical Thinking
8 25 (11.11%) Risk Management
9 24 (10.67%) DevOps
10 20 (8.89%) PRINCE2
11 18 (8.00%) Business Analysis
11 18 (8.00%) People Management
11 18 (8.00%) Project Delivery
12 17 (7.56%) Cybersecurity
13 16 (7.11%) Collaborative Working
13 16 (7.11%) Conflict Management
13 16 (7.11%) Incident Management
13 16 (7.11%) Test Scripting
Programming Languages
1 39 (17.33%) SQL
2 21 (9.33%) Java
3 17 (7.56%) Python
4 14 (6.22%) JavaScript
5 13 (5.78%) C#
6 10 (4.44%) PowerShell
7 7 (3.11%) TypeScript
8 5 (2.22%) Bicep
9 3 (1.33%) Go
9 3 (1.33%) Groovy
9 3 (1.33%) Perl
9 3 (1.33%) R
9 3 (1.33%) Ruby
9 3 (1.33%) Scala
10 2 (0.89%) PHP
11 1 (0.44%) Kotlin
11 1 (0.44%) VB
Qualifications
1 66 (29.33%) Degree
2 41 (18.22%) Security Cleared
3 39 (17.33%) SC Cleared
4 22 (9.78%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
5 16 (7.11%) MCSE
5 16 (7.11%) Microsoft Certification
6 15 (6.67%) HNC
6 15 (6.67%) HND
6 15 (6.67%) Master's Degree
6 15 (6.67%) MCSA
7 12 (5.33%) PMI Certification
7 12 (5.33%) PMP
8 10 (4.44%) Computer Science Degree
9 8 (3.56%) Cisco Certification
10 7 (3.11%) CCNA
11 6 (2.67%) ITIL Certification
11 6 (2.67%) Postgraduate
12 4 (1.78%) Chartered Engineer
13 3 (1.33%) CISSP
13 3 (1.33%) SAP Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (4.89%) QA
2 8 (3.56%) SLA
3 6 (2.67%) ISO/IEC 27001
3 6 (2.67%) PMO
4 3 (1.33%) Data Quality
4 3 (1.33%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
4 3 (1.33%) NIST
4 3 (1.33%) PCI DSS
5 1 (0.44%) Accessibility
5 1 (0.44%) Disclosure Scotland
5 1 (0.44%) FedRAMP
5 1 (0.44%) HAZOP
5 1 (0.44%) HIPAA
5 1 (0.44%) ISO 20022
5 1 (0.44%) SOC 2
System Software
1 25 (11.11%) Active Directory
1 25 (11.11%) VMware Infrastructure
2 9 (4.00%) VMware NSX
3 8 (3.56%) VMware ESXi
4 5 (2.22%) Docker
4 5 (2.22%) Hyper-V
5 4 (1.78%) NFS
6 3 (1.33%) Apache ZooKeeper
7 2 (0.89%) Microsoft Virtual Server
7 2 (0.89%) Virtual Servers
Systems Management
1 8 (3.56%) vCenter Server
2 5 (2.22%) Ansible
3 4 (1.78%) Microsoft Intune
3 4 (1.78%) Single Sign-On
4 3 (1.33%) Grafana
4 3 (1.33%) PingFederate
4 3 (1.33%) Terraform
5 2 (0.89%) WSUS
6 1 (0.44%) FortiGate
6 1 (0.44%) Nessus
6 1 (0.44%) Nmap
6 1 (0.44%) PowerCLI
6 1 (0.44%) Progress Chef
6 1 (0.44%) Puppet
6 1 (0.44%) SCCM
6 1 (0.44%) SCOM
Vendors
1 53 (23.56%) Microsoft
2 26 (11.56%) VMware
3 19 (8.44%) SAP
4 10 (4.44%) Oracle
5 9 (4.00%) Adobe
5 9 (4.00%) Atlassian
5 9 (4.00%) Cisco
6 6 (2.67%) ServiceNow
7 5 (2.22%) ION Trading
8 4 (1.78%) Avaya
8 4 (1.78%) Citrix
8 4 (1.78%) Databricks
8 4 (1.78%) Ivanti
8 4 (1.78%) Sun
9 3 (1.33%) Ping Identity
10 2 (0.89%) Conga
10 2 (0.89%) DocuSign
10 2 (0.89%) Salesforce
10 2 (0.89%) SolarWinds
10 2 (0.89%) Veeam