Most training providers will tell you the salary you could earn. Very few will tell you where the number came from, when it was measured, or how many of those jobs actually exist. Here is the whole table, from one source, with the date attached.
Two columns matter and they matter differently. The salary tells you what the job is worth. The vacancy count tells you how many chances you get — and a well-paid role with two hundred openings a year is a harder target than a middling one with three thousand.
| Role | Median salary | Jobs advertised |
|---|---|---|
| SAP Consultant | £80,000 | 226 |
| Data Scientist | £75,000 | 585 |
| AI roles | £72,500 | 9,384 |
| Data Engineer | £70,000 | 1,971 |
| Cloud Engineer | £70,000 | 1,276 |
| DevOps Engineer | £70,000 | 1,270 |
| Salesforce | £62,500 | 1,432 |
| Full Stack Developer | £60,000 | 1,054 |
| Business Analyst | £55,000 | 1,590 |
| Security Analyst | £55,000 | 1,083 |
| Data Analyst | £47,937 | 1,512 |
| QA Engineer | £45,000 | 332 |
| IT Analyst | £35,000 | 888 |
| IT Support | £31,750 | 2,773 |
How to read this without misleading yourself
These are median advertised salaries, not starting salaries. The median is the middle of everything advertised, which includes people with ten years of experience. Your first role in any of these will sit below the figure shown — often well below. Treat the table as the shape of a career, not a starting offer.
The vacancy counts are permanent roles advertised over six months, not a live count of what is open this minute. They are useful for comparing one field against another, which is what they are here for.
The three things the table actually tells you
- Volume and pay are not the same decision. AI roles lead on both, but IT support has more openings than data science and cloud engineering combined — and it is the most common way people without a technical background get their first job in the industry at all.
- Some well-paid fields are small. SAP consulting pays the most in this table and advertises the fewest roles. That is not a reason to avoid it; it is a reason to know what you are choosing before you spend months on it.
- The entry point and the destination can be different roles. Plenty of people start in support or analysis and move into cloud or data within two years, which is a far more common path than jumping straight into the highest-paid column.
Where these figures came from
IT Jobs Watch, which derives both the salary and the vacancy count from UK job adverts over a rolling six-month window. Every row links to the page it came from, so you can check any of it yourself and see how it has moved since.
These describe the market you would be entering. They are not our graduates' results — we do not publish outcome figures we have not measured, and when we have them, they will be labelled as ours rather than as the market's.