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Job market research · UK

Know your job market before deciding.

For any occupation: how many adverts, where they are, how that has changed, what they ask for, and the salaries they state.

Job titles are matched against the official SOC 2020 coding index, which is how ONS classifies occupations. It does not look at individual adverts.

3 possible matches. Choose the occupation that describes the work.

We found 3 possible matches

These are all plausible. Choosing for you would mean guessing, so pick the one that describes the work.

Already have a specific advert? Check a job advert

Where other people started.

What was searched here, not what is happening in the job market.

Six things worth having to hand.

None of them needs an account, and none of them keeps anything you type.

  • What to have ready

    The documents, dates and references worth gathering before the first application.

  • Where to search

    Where the actual vacancies are published. This site carries the evidence, not the adverts.

  • Check a job advert

    Paste an advert and see what it states, what it leaves out, and what to ask about.

  • Compare job offers

    Two offers side by side, including the parts of an offer that are not the salary.

  • Before you resign

    The checks that are cheap before you hand in notice and impossible afterwards.

  • If you have lost your job

    What to do in the first week, in the order the clock actually puts it.

How occupation demand is changing.

ONS publishes 412 occupations. May 2026 against May 2025, each occupation compared only with itself.

  • 11% of occupations had more new online adverts than a year earlier
  • 89% of occupations had fewer new online adverts than a year earlier

Online job adverts observed in an ONS-published measure.

More about this figure

This counts adverts, not vacancies and not positions that exist. ONS recorded roughly 66 percent more adverts than official Vacancy Survey vacancies for the same month. Each occupation is compared only with itself, over the same two published months, and no occupation counts are added together — ONS publishes no whole-economy occupation total. 2025-05 and 2026-05 are the same month a year apart, which is what makes them comparable without a seasonal adjustment this product does not make, and they sit inside one stretch of the series with no documented change in what ONS collected between them.

What job adverts ask for.

The requirements mentioned most often across UK online job adverts in 2025 so far, as a share of adverts.

  1. Business Operations and Project Management
  2. Workplace and Professional Skills
  3. Information Technology and Cloud Infrastructure
  4. Sales and Customer Relationship Management
  5. Legal, Governance, Risk and Compliance
  6. Healthcare, Life Sciences and Related Systems
  7. Finance and Accounting
  8. Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering

The share of new online job adverts mentioning this requirement, not a count.

More about this figure

The taxonomy is Textkernel's SCO, which is not SOC. These are whole-economy shares for 2025 and say nothing about any one occupation; search a role to see its own requirements. 2025 is not yet covered in full, so these shares sit on a shorter window than the years before them. No earlier year is set beside these. The most recent complete pair, 2023 and 2024, cannot be compared: the collection these shares are drawn from gained and lost sources between them, so a difference would be partly a change in what was collected rather than in what adverts ask for.

What the evidence covers, and what it does not.

Every figure carries the period it describes and the limitation that applies to it. Where the evidence cannot support a comparison, the page says so.

Covers

  • Online job adverts in published ONS statistics, by occupation and month.
  • The requirements those adverts mentioned, as a share of adverts.
  • Advertised salary history, where the publisher reports it.
  • Which UK region the adverts were placed in.
  • Official Vacancy Survey figures, kept separate because they measure vacancies.

Does not

  • How many jobs are available. One advert can be several positions, a speculative opportunity or a training route; ONS recorded roughly 66 per cent more adverts than official vacancies for the same month.
  • Which employers are advertising, or any individual advert.
  • What anyone is paid. Advertised salary is not pay.
  • Whether an occupation is a good choice for you.
How this works and where the data comes from

Start with the job you are curious about.

Keep the occupations you are actually interested in, and the published evidence for each of them is on one page. Nothing is added because you looked at it, and no account is needed, this browser is how we know which list is yours.

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