Choosing a specialism: what the UK demand numbers say, and what they can't

This site keeps a live jobs page that tracks UK demand for infrastructure roles, refreshed daily from IT Jobs Watch's published statistics. I built it because when I was trying to pick a direction, all anyone offered me was vibes: "cloud is hot", "networking is dead", "get into security". Vibes are a terrible basis for a decision that shapes your next five years, and they are especially bad for those of us whose brains latch onto the last confident voice we heard. So this piece does something different: it looks at what the numbers actually said on one specific day, today, 12 August 2026, and then talks honestly about how a neurodivergent person might use them. Numbers first, feelings second, but both.

What the board actually says today

From today's snapshot of UK advertised vacancies (source: IT Jobs Watch; figures are live ad counts and median advertised salaries, not offers in hand):

• Cyber security (all roles): about 4,200 live ads, median £60,000
• DevOps: about 4,200 ads, median £70,000
• Data centre roles: about 1,400 ads, median £65,000
• Security engineer: about 970 ads, median £60,000
• Cloud engineer: about 930 ads, median £70,000
• Platform engineer: about 880 ads, median £80,000
• Infrastructure engineer: about 560 ads, median £55,000
• Network engineer: about 520 ads, median £60,000
• Cloud architect: about 420 ads, median £90,000
• Site reliability engineer: about 260 ads, median £77,500
• Systems administrator: about 90 ads, median £45,000
• Database administrator: about 60 ads, median £60,000
• 2nd line support: about 60 ads, median £33,000
• 1st line support: about 50 ads, median £28,000

Before anything else, the caveats, because a chart without caveats is a trap. These are counts of advertisements on one board on one day, not of jobs: support roles especially are often filled through agencies and local listings that never reach a national board, so the bottom of this table understates reality. Medians of advertised salaries run high, are dragged up by London, and say nothing about what you will be offered. And a snapshot is weather, not climate. Treat every number as one witness, not a verdict. The jobs page updates daily if you want to watch the weather move.

What I think the shape means

Even with those caveats, the shape of the table is loud.

The volume lives in security and DevOps. Those two categories are each larger than the next several specialisms combined. That has a practical meaning beyond "easy to find work": volume is leverage. If there are 4,000 employers hiring for your skills, you can afford to walk away from the one with the hostile open-plan office, the vague job description and the interviewer who scoffed at your headphones. If there are 50, you take what you can get. For anyone who needs the working environment to be right, and many of us genuinely do, demand is not just income security. It is the power to be choosy about the conditions your brain works under.

The traditional generalist path has narrowed. Systems administrator, the role half my generation came up through, shows fewer than a hundred ads. The work has not vanished; it has been re-labelled and re-tooled into cloud, platform and DevOps roles, and pays £25,000 more under the new names. If you are a sysadmin today, the data's message is blunt but friendly: your experience is wanted, but it is wanted wearing new clothes, and the retraining premium is real.

The entry-level door looks narrow on paper. Fifty-odd advertised 1st line roles nationally looks terrifying if that is your way in. Remember the caveat: this tier is the most undercounted, because it is hired locally and through agencies. But it is also true that the bottom rung pays well under half of what the middle rungs pay, which is the strongest argument I know for treating support as a doorway rather than a destination: get in, collect the patterns, and keep moving.

Depth is priced. Platform engineering at £80,000, architecture at £90,000, SRE at £77,500: smaller ad counts, bigger numbers. These are roles where you are paid for accumulated judgement rather than ticket throughput. They are destinations, not entrances.

The part the data cannot tell you

Here is where I refuse to do the thing some career content does to neurodivergent readers: I am not going to tell you that autistic people belong in security or that ADHD brains should all be incident responders. People are not their diagnostic labels, and I have met every combination of brain and specialism thriving somewhere.

What I will say is that specialisms have textures, and textures matter more for us because the cost of a mismatch is higher. The questions that actually predict whether a role fits are questions about an ordinary Tuesday. Is the work interrupt-driven, like support and operations, or deep and self-paced, like architecture and engineering? Is there on-call, and does your sleep, medication, or recovery pattern survive it? How much of the job is producing documents under time pressure, and how much is solving problems where your hands and eyes do the talking? Is the environment a loud NOC, a client site every week, a data centre hall, or your own spare room with your own lighting and your own silence?

None of those answers appear in a salary table. The honest method, I think, is to use each source for what it can see: use texture to shortlist the specialisms your brain would actually enjoy on a wet Tuesday in February, and then use demand to choose among them, because demand is what buys you the leverage to insist on the conditions you need. A specialism you love with no market forces you to endure bad employers. A specialism the market loves but your brain hates is a salary attached to a slow burnout. You need both numbers and texture to say yes.

The data on the jobs page will have moved by the time you read this. The method does not move: caveats first, shape second, texture always.

Job statistics in this article are from IT Jobs Watch, used with attribution under their licence terms; snapshot taken 12 August 2026.