Exploratory Testing Contracts

Exploratory Testing
UK

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

6 months to
2 Jun 2024
Same period 2023 Same period 2022
Rank 549 636 714
Rank change year-on-year +87 +78 -71
Contract jobs citing Exploratory Testing 30 48 127
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.070% 0.085% 0.14%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.081% 0.095% 0.16%
Number of daily rates quoted 25 36 93
10th Percentile £350 £336 £313
25th Percentile £363 £382 £350
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £435 £481 £425
Median % change year-on-year -9.61% +13.24% +0.89%
75th Percentile £475 £600 £488
90th Percentile £523 £670 £506
UK excluding London median daily rate £413 £463 £463
% change year-on-year -10.81% - +13.85%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 2 3
10th Percentile - £51.63 £18.80
25th Percentile - £52.19 £21.13
Median hourly rate £62.50 £53.75 £25.00
Median % change year-on-year +16.28% +115.00% -10.65%
75th Percentile - £54.69 £43.13
90th Percentile - £54.88 £54.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £62.50 £53.75 £19.50
% change year-on-year +16.28% +175.64% -34.91%

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

Exploratory Testing 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 36,816 50,571 79,556
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 85.44% 89.70% 90.62%
Number of daily rates quoted 23,638 35,025 55,934
10th Percentile £300 £325 £348
25th Percentile £413 £438 £433
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £525 £550 £538
Median % change year-on-year -4.55% +2.33% +7.50%
75th Percentile £638 £650 £644
90th Percentile £750 £750 £738
UK excluding London median daily rate £500 £500 £488
% change year-on-year - +2.56% +8.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2,533 1,671 1,865
10th Percentile £12.75 £10.63 £12.50
25th Percentile £16.00 £15.57 £15.63
Median hourly rate £36.50 £36.00 £25.68
Median % change year-on-year +1.39% +40.19% +9.70%
75th Percentile £60.75 £65.00 £50.00
90th Percentile £72.50 £75.00 £65.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £38.12 £35.00 £20.00
% change year-on-year +8.91% +75.00% -4.88%

Exploratory Testing
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Exploratory Testing as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Exploratory Testing in the UK

Exploratory Testing
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Exploratory Testing.

Daily rate trend for Exploratory Testing in the UK

Exploratory Testing
Daily Rate Histogram

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Exploratory Testing over the 6 months to 2 June 2024.

Daily rate histogram for Exploratory Testing in the UK

Exploratory Testing
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Exploratory Testing.

Hourly rate trend for Exploratory Testing in the UK

Exploratory Testing
Top 10 Contract Locations

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Exploratory Testing within the UK over the 6 months to 2 June 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 +83 30 £435 -5.95% 17
UK excluding London +44 15 £413 -10.81% 13
Work from Home +99 12 £438 -5.41% 8
London +89 12 £436 -20.68% 4
North of England +32 5 £463 +1.37% 4
Midlands +28 5 £400 - 1
South East +7 5 £350 -12.50% 2
East Midlands - 5 £400 -
North West +19 4 £450 -10.00% 4
Yorkshire +21 1 £475 +15.15%

Exploratory Testing
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 4 (13.33%) Confluence
2 2 (6.67%) CMS
Applications
1 1 (3.33%) Microsoft Excel
Cloud Services
1 6 (20.00%) AWS
2 4 (13.33%) Azure
3 2 (6.67%) Azure DevOps
3 2 (6.67%) GCP
3 2 (6.67%) Power Platform
3 2 (6.67%) Serverless
4 1 (3.33%) AWS Lambda
4 1 (3.33%) Azure Data Factory
4 1 (3.33%) Azure Event Grid
4 1 (3.33%) Azure Functions
4 1 (3.33%) Azure Logic Apps
4 1 (3.33%) BrowserStack
4 1 (3.33%) Dynamics 365
4 1 (3.33%) GitHub
4 1 (3.33%) Microsoft Purview
4 1 (3.33%) SaaS
4 1 (3.33%) SpeedCurve
Communications & Networking
1 4 (13.33%) TCP/IP
Database & Business Intelligence
1 2 (6.67%) PostgreSQL
1 2 (6.67%) Power BI
2 1 (3.33%) Azure SQL Database
2 1 (3.33%) Parquet
Development Applications
1 8 (26.67%) JIRA
2 6 (20.00%) Selenium
3 5 (16.67%) TestRail
4 4 (13.33%) Postman
5 3 (10.00%) Cucumber
5 3 (10.00%) JUnit
5 3 (10.00%) SoapUI
5 3 (10.00%) TestNG
5 3 (10.00%) WebDriver
6 2 (6.67%) Cypress.io
6 2 (6.67%) Gerrit
6 2 (6.67%) Git
6 2 (6.67%) Jenkins
6 2 (6.67%) REST Assured
6 2 (6.67%) Serenity BDD
7 1 (3.33%) Gatling
7 1 (3.33%) GitLab
7 1 (3.33%) Pa11y
7 1 (3.33%) Protractor
7 1 (3.33%) TestCafe
General
1 5 (16.67%) Analytical Skills
1 5 (16.67%) Social Skills
2 4 (13.33%) Automotive
3 2 (6.67%) Finance
3 2 (6.67%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 11 (36.67%) Test Engineer
1 11 (36.67%) Tester
2 8 (26.67%) Automation Tester
3 6 (20.00%) Analyst
3 6 (20.00%) Senior
4 5 (16.67%) Senior Test Engineer
5 4 (13.33%) Systems Engineer
5 4 (13.33%) Systems Test Engineer
6 3 (10.00%) Business Analyst
6 3 (10.00%) Test Analyst
6 3 (10.00%) Unix Engineer
6 3 (10.00%) Unix Systems Engineer
7 2 (6.67%) Manual Tester
7 2 (6.67%) QA Analyst
7 2 (6.67%) QA Test Analyst
8 1 (3.33%) QA Engineer
8 1 (3.33%) QA Tester
8 1 (3.33%) Senior Test Analyst
8 1 (3.33%) Technical Analyst
8 1 (3.33%) Test Coordinator
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 3 (10.00%) AngularJS
2 2 (6.67%) CSS
2 2 (6.67%) HTML
2 2 (6.67%) JSON
2 2 (6.67%) SOAP
3 1 (3.33%) .NET
3 1 (3.33%) ADO
3 1 (3.33%) AWS CDK
3 1 (3.33%) Kafka
3 1 (3.33%) React
3 1 (3.33%) REST
3 1 (3.33%) XML
Miscellaneous
1 2 (6.67%) Enterprise Software
1 2 (6.67%) Product Ownership
2 1 (3.33%) Cloud Native
2 1 (3.33%) EPoS
Operating Systems
1 6 (20.00%) Unix
2 5 (16.67%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 24 (80.00%) Test Automation
2 15 (50.00%) Agile
3 13 (43.33%) End-to-End Testing
4 11 (36.67%) Functional Testing
5 10 (33.33%) Scenario Testing
5 10 (33.33%) User Acceptance Testing
6 7 (23.33%) Continuous Improvement
6 7 (23.33%) Scrum
7 6 (20.00%) Open Source
7 6 (20.00%) SDLC
7 6 (20.00%) System Integration Testing
7 6 (20.00%) TDD
7 6 (20.00%) Test Strategy
8 5 (16.67%) Acceptance Criteria
8 5 (16.67%) CI/CD
8 5 (16.67%) Regression Testing
9 4 (13.33%) BDD
9 4 (13.33%) Kanban
9 4 (13.33%) Project Planning
9 4 (13.33%) Use Case
Programming Languages
1 9 (30.00%) Java
2 7 (23.33%) SQL
3 4 (13.33%) Python
3 4 (13.33%) Shell Script
4 3 (10.00%) Ruby
4 3 (10.00%) TypeScript
5 2 (6.67%) C#
5 2 (6.67%) JavaScript
5 2 (6.67%) Perl
6 1 (3.33%) PHP
6 1 (3.33%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 6 (20.00%) Degree
2 4 (13.33%) HNC
2 4 (13.33%) ISTQB
2 4 (13.33%) ISTQB Foundation Certification
2 4 (13.33%) Master's Degree
3 3 (10.00%) SC Cleared
3 3 (10.00%) Security Cleared
4 1 (3.33%) Computer Science Degree
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 11 (36.67%) QA
2 6 (20.00%) Accessibility
3 4 (13.33%) Data Quality
System Software
1 2 (6.67%) Docker
Systems Management
1 3 (10.00%) Kibana
2 2 (6.67%) Kubernetes
2 2 (6.67%) Opsgenie
3 1 (3.33%) Grafana
3 1 (3.33%) HP ALM
Vendors
1 6 (20.00%) ServiceNow
2 2 (6.67%) Dynatrace
2 2 (6.67%) Microsoft
2 2 (6.67%) PagerDuty
2 2 (6.67%) Splunk
3 1 (3.33%) HP
3 1 (3.33%) Spotify