Data reveals the most in demand tech job in the UK

With the UK’s tech industry being the world’s third largest, a surge in tech job opportunities has reportedly reached a 10 year high.

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With this in mind, The Knowledge Academy were eager to learn more about the UK’s most in-demand tech jobs and skills in 2023, by scraping 10,800 information technology job listings. Based on job location, they also revealed the best UK cities to work in for tech workers and graduates.

The top 10 most in-demand tech jobs in 2023

Please see the full dataset here on Onedrive and images for here.

The research found that Project Manager is the most in-demand tech job for 2023,with 359 active roles in the IT job market, offering an average salary of £47,295 in the UK.

An IT Project Manager oversees the department’s objectives and directs strategy changes, playing a key role in implementing IT projects such as developing hardware or transforming organisational digital communications.

In second place is .Net Developer, with 320 jobs listed at the time of writing.

According to Indeed salary checker, it is estimated that the average salary of a UK-based .Net Developer is £53,169.

NET Developers help businesses building various types of applications, including web, mobile, AI and cloud so people who specialise in .Net are still in high demand among startups and big tech companies.

C# Developer ranks as the third most in-demand tech job in the UK, with over 200 current job listings available.

With an average salary of £61,435, C# Developers are usually those who specialise in the coding language of C++. It differs from a .Net Developer role where more knowledge of the whole framework and ecosystem is needed.

Ranking fourth place is Software Engineer, with 181 vacancies listed in the UK.

Earning an average salary of £50,557, Software Engineers are key to businesses by developing high-quality software solutions and managing complex databases. This drives businesses’ efficiency in enhancing data security, system reliability and smooth communication, especially in 2023 where e-commerce and fintech are thriving.

Top 10 most important skills for tech workers

Please see the full dataset here on Onedrive and images for here.

Project management tops the list of the most in-demand tech skills, ahead of other technical IT skills such as C# programming. Project management relies on lots of soft skills which make it highly in demand – being mentioned 6,616 times in job descriptions.

If you are looking for a similar role, it is important to show interviewers your leadership, communication and decision-making skills which are important in managing successful IT projects.

Infrastructure ranks as the second most in-demand tech skill for 2023.

An expert in this field typically possesses extensive knowledge of tech insights for an organisation. With this term featuring up 5,403 times in UK job adverts, an Infrastructure Engineer ought to be knowledgeable about every piece of hardware, software, and network resources that is required to provide IT services to maintain an organisation’s productivity.

Programming languages are still crucial to work in tech sector, with SQL and C# Language ranking in the top 5 most in-demand skills!

If you do wish to use the data or the analysis provided, we would greatly appreciate a link to https://www.theknowledgeacademy.com/ , who commissioned and provided the full research and data. This allows us to keep supplying you with future content, which you may find useful.

Methodology

The Knowledge Academy is keen to find out the most in-demand tech jobs and skills needed in 2023
10,800 jobs under the Information Technology category were scraped from a job listing site.
Then, the description of each job was cleaned using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Following this, the python library skillNer was used to extract skills from each job description. SkillNer uses rule based NLP to extract skills and certifications from unlabelled job listings.
Note: as with any rule based NLP system, this is not 100% accurate, meaning there may be some misclassification.
Once the key skills had been extracted from each job, the next goal was to cluster together similar skills. For example, the skills “javascript” and “java development” are functionally the same.
To do so, the Python module FuzzyWuzzy was used to find skills that were 80% similar to one another. These skills were gathered under the same umbrella skill.
After this, some manual checking was done to ensure the accuracy of the classifications, but due to the size of the data set, this will not be 100% accurate and will have some false positives.
Finally, raw counts of each umbrella skill was obtained, and a word cloud was created to visualise which skills are most in demand in the IT sector.
The same was done for job titles following the steps above.
Job salaries for the UK were obtained from Indeed online salary checker using the closest compatible job title
Data was collected in Oct 2023 and is correct as of then.