Communication skills are most desired by UK employers
Communication and coordination topped this month’s list of emerging skills, demonstrating that employers need employees who can work well with others and clearly articulate what they need. They are also increasingly seeking workers who come in with existing commercial knowledge, ready to hit the ground running.
Smaller organisations are hiring
Job openings in companies with 10-49 employees were a larger share of the job market than in previous months. And companies with more than 600 employees lost share of the open job market. This is in line with recent lay-offs by large international employers like Amazon and Oracle. But smaller, possibly more nimble, companies are continuing to hire.
Methodology
Market IQ collects job postings daily from over 5 million websites across the U.K. Our system automatically identifies, extracts, and structures job data into 100+ attributes using Textkernel’s AI powered parsing technology. Each posting is normalised against professional taxonomies, enriched with company information, and deduplicated using sophisticated algorithms to identify unique job opportunities. The system maintains high levels of accuracy through automated quality controls and continuous improvement processes, making it a trusted source for U.K. labour market insights.
Skills
Market IQ utilizes Textkernel’s proprietary Skills Normalisation Taxonomy (SNT) to extract and normalise skills from job postings. Our taxonomy encompasses 13,200+ unique skill concepts mapped through 250,000+ terms, covering professional skills, IT skills, soft skills, and languages. Using advanced machine learning, the system identifies skills in context, disambiguates ambiguous terms, and normalises them to standardised concepts—enabling accurate cross-market analysis regardless of how employers phrase skill requirements. The taxonomy is continuously updated quarterly based on millions of job postings, market feedback, and labour market trends. This data-driven approach ensures Market IQ captures both established and emerging skills as they appear in the U.K. job market, providing unparalleled insights into skill demand across industries and regions. All analysis of skills excludes any skills that appear in fewer than 10,000 job descriptions.
