About IT Jobs Watch

Since 2004, IT Jobs Watch has published a unique, demand-side view of the digital and information technology employment landscape. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive and accurate survey of the prevailing UK job market conditions.

By combining real-time job market insights with an extensive job aggregator, we offer a single platform for anyone interested in exploring and finding work within the technology sector.

We publish national and regional labour market statistics and actionable insights under a Creative Commons license including:

• Headline job market statistics and indicators
• Trends in skills, technologies and capabilities
• Job role trends
• Salary benchmarking
• Contractor rate benchmarking
• Skill set analysis

The statistics are recalculated on a daily basis to ensure you have access to all the latest trends and insights.

This website serves a broad range of users, including job seekers, industry professionals, recruitment agents, HR personnel, students, researchers, and journalists.

The homepage displays a market index of permanent job roles, skills, technologies, and capabilities in a structured table format, with entries initially ranked by popularity. The market index is updated daily and today covers the 6 month period to Saturday 21 December 2024.

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/Work from Home (WFH).

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.

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 50^th 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:

1. The 25^th to 75^th 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.

2. The 10^th to 90^th 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.

Check our June 2017 methodology update. In recognition of a significant trend, we have updated the methodology we employ to calculate percentiles in order to enhance the accuracy of our salary distribution statistics.