Glassdoor has revealed its 25 Best Jobs in the UK 2020 report, with a tech-based role taking the top spot for the first time.
January is well-known among employers and recruiters as a time for employee reflection and evaluation, making it one of the hottest periods of the year for job hunting. Job review and recruitment site Glassdoor, which has just published its 2020 report on the 25 Best Jobs in the UK, claimed that this month will see a “17pc spike in job applications”.
But what fields should workers be setting their sights on? With the emergence of new technologies and workplace priorities, Glassdoor’s list of best jobs has been evolving over the past few years.
This list is based on Glassdoor’s analysis of open listings on its site, salaries reported and job satisfaction ratings given by users, and this year saw 11 new roles appear in the line-up, including DevOps engineer, customer success manager and product designer.
According to Glassdoor, this year’s top five best jobs in the UK are:
- Enterprise architect
- Product manager
- Operations manager
- Business development manager
- DevOps engineer
Tech comes out on top
Glassdoor said this was the first year that a tech job has claimed the top spot on its list. The enterprise architect position received a satisfaction score of 3.9 out of five on the site, with more than 2,500 openings for the role, boasting a median base salary of £75,209.
Last year’s front runner – audit manager – fell off the 2020 list entirely, as did marketing manager, which occupied third place in 2019.
However, it wasn’t all about tech, with Glassdoor finding that just five of the 25 Best Jobs were strictly technology-based, including data scientist, software engineer and data engineer.
‘An increasing level of highly-prized job satisfaction’
Amanda Stansell, senior economic research analyst at Glassdoor, highlighted the increasingly diverse nature of the jobs market, in which “new skills emerge and new technologies change the world of work”.
“As we enter a new decade for jobseekers, the 25 Best Jobs in the UK for 2020 aims to highlight roles that are in demand, offer desirable salaries and also give workers job satisfaction,” she said. “Enterprise architect is the first technology role to be named the Best Job in the UK, beating marketing, finance and ops roles that have traditionally taken the top spot.
“With the highest salary of the 25 Best Jobs, this demonstrates that technology roles are not only offering attractive compensation, but also offer an increasing level of highly prized job satisfaction.
“That said, we see a wide variety of job fields in the top 25. From sales, marketing and technology, through to HR, recruitment, engineering and more. Experienced jobseekers from any of these fields are well-placed to maximise the vast number of open roles that we see today.”
Glassdoor methodology
Glassdoor’s report features its 25 ‘best jobs’ based on each role’s overall Glassdoor job score. The Glassdoor job score is determined using three key factors: salaries reported on the site, its open listings as of 18 December 2019, and job satisfaction ratings given by people working in the jobs to Glassdoor. The report also takes into account job title normalisation that groups similar job titles. C-suite and intern level jobs were excluded from the analysis.
Notably, all jobs that made the list offer a median salary higher than the national average wage in the UK. This year’s highest climber was HR business partner, which jumped 13 places to seventh place. The job reported as giving employees the highest satisfaction was corporate recruiter, achieving a satisfaction score of 4.5 out of five.
Finally, the report showed that software engineers are still in high demand in the UK. The field was found to have the highest number of open jobs across the region at 6,000.
