About IT Jobs Watch
Our Unique Perspective
Since 2004, IT Jobs Watch has published a unique, demand-side view of the UK digital and information technology employment landscape. The website is built on a commitment to open data and analysis. All published statistics and insights are released under a Creative Commons licence and recalculated on a daily basis.
Published material includes:
- Headline job market statistics and indicators
- Trends in skills, technologies and capabilities
- Job role trends
- Salary benchmarking
- Contractor rate benchmarking
- Skill set analysis
The data is available alongside an extensive digital and IT job board, giving a single platform for anyone exploring or finding work within the technology sector.
The website serves a broad audience that includes job seekers, industry professionals, recruitment agents, HR personnel, students, researchers, and journalists.
Open Research Notes
IT Jobs Watch also publishes an open research strand that complements the demand-side data work. Research Notes is concerned with patterns, weak signal analysis, framework and vocabulary development, and provisional commentary on the wider landscape of technological change. The data work reports what is measurable now. The research examines what is becoming visible.
The corpus to date includes work on AI-mediated coordination, protocol design, and vocabulary for emerging technological phenomena. The research is written for strategists, executives, managers, architects, academics, researchers, and journalists, and is published as living documents under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. For a fuller account of the editorial position, methodology, and licensing, see the Aims and Scope page.
Getting Started
The Permanent Job Market Index displays permanent job roles, skills, technologies, and capabilities in a structured table format, with entries initially ranked by popularity. The job market index is updated daily and today covers the 6 month period to .
The index can be filtered using the search panel. For example, by:
- Selecting multiple skill and/or job role search terms
- Filtering by multiple choice category. For example, Programming Languages
- Selecting a job location such as London or Hybrid/Remote.
The market index can be sorted in ascending or descending order by clicking the column headings.
Each entry in the index links to in-depth analysis and historical trends dating back to 2004.
Rank: denotes the relative popularity of each entry based on the number of unique job vacancies observed over a 6 or 3-month period. A rank of 1 signifies the highest popularity. This rank is calculated at a national level, as well as for individual regions, areas, and cities.
Rank Change: measures the shift in popularity of an entry over the previous 6 or 3-month period compared to the same period in the previous year. This figure serves as a basic indicator of relative change in demand across the entire job market. A positive Rank Change signifies a relative increase in demand, whereas a negative value indicates a relative fall in demand.
Example Insights
Contractor Daily Rates
Methodology
Since 2004, IT Jobs Watch has published free demand-side labour market insights including digital and information technology skill set trends, salary and contractor rate benchmarking and job vacancy statistics.
We research and publish actionable insights based on continuous and rigorous analysis of digital and IT job vacancy postings.
Contractor rates are calculated directly from the figures quoted. We do not derive average hourly rates from daily rates quoted or vice versa.
Duplicate Adverts
The same vacancy can be advertised across several channels. Employers and agencies may post a vacancy to several job boards and repost it over time. Without deduplication the figures would measure advertising effort rather than underlying demand. Deduplication therefore forms a significant part of our processing, so that each vacancy is counted once however many times and in however many places it was advertised.
How We Count Job Titles
Job titles are inconsistent, not only across the economy, but between departments and even teams within the same organisation. They are chosen partly to attract applicants, and like fashion they follow trends. We therefore measure demand in the market's own words. Titles are tracked as they emerge in job adverts and added once they have appeared often enough to be a signal rather than noise, so new roles surface in our figures as the market creates them. When a title is added, our statistics are restated so that its history is counted from its first appearance, not from the day it was recognised.
A job title is read from the title of an advert, never from its body. An advert matches a job title when its own title is that job title or, with few exceptions, a more specific form of it, and it counts once towards every title it matches. An advert titled Senior Python Developer matches Senior Python Developer, Python Developer, Senior Developer, Developer and Senior. We call Developer a broader title and Senior Python Developer a narrower one. Because a title can sit beneath more than one broader title, titles overlap as well as nest. Titles that may describe similar work in different words, such as Software Engineer and Software Developer, are reported separately; the choice between them is part of what the market is doing.
A broad title such as Developer or Data Scientist therefore gathers every advert for its narrower titles, which allows questions no single advert can answer. Which programming languages are Analysts most often asked for? How has pay for Data Scientists moved while the specialisms within the role have come and gone? Read the other way, the Insights page for a title shows which narrower titles employers advertise most, and so where the role is specialising.
Two cautions follow. Figures for related titles overlap and must not be added together; the adverts matching Python Developer are already counted under Developer. And the salary and rate figures for a broad title describe a mixture of specialisms and levels, so a change in its median can reflect a change in that mixture as well as in pay. The narrower titles listed on the page show what that mixture is.
For the same reason, the co-occurring job titles on an Insights page leave out a title that would add nothing: one whose words all appear in the page's own title, or in another listed title, and whose adverts on the page are exactly that title's. They also leave out bare levels such as Senior, which describe seniority rather than a role. Developer is not listed on the Python Developer page, because every Python Developer advert is also a Developer advert. Senior Developer is not listed either, because on that page its adverts are exactly those of Senior Python Developer, which is.
Salary Distributions
Our salary distributions, including the median, offer a guide and are calculated directly from the figures quoted in job vacancy postings. Benefits in kind, bonuses, etc., are not included in the calculations.
Average salaries (and average contractor rates) are based on the median or 50th percentile.
Most salary distributions tend to be positively skewed, with a larger number of lower salaries and a small number of high salaries. Very high or low salaries in respect to the rest of the market are referred to as outliers. Average salaries based on the arithmetic mean are adversely affected by these outliers. Outliers that are high tend to drive the mean upward. Similarly, very low outliers tend to drive the mean downward.
The median is not affected by outliers and as such provides a more representative market average for salaries.
To provide perspective on the distribution of salaries, we include two standard ranges around the median in the salary and contractor rate trend charts:
- The 25th to 75th percentile range (or interquartile range) represents the middle 50% of salaries closest to the median. The interquartile range excludes the lowest 25% and highest 25% of salaries.
- The 10th to 90th percentile range (or interdecile range) represents 80% of salaries closest to the median. The interdecile range excludes the lowest 10% and highest 10% of salaries.