Method and disclosure

About projectmanagerjobs.co.uk

Updated

What this is

A specialist index of UK project management jobs, with the pay attached

projectmanagerjobs.co.uk lists live project management jobs across the United Kingdom and, next to them, what each project management role is being advertised at right now — nationally, sector by sector, and city by city.

It is built for the whole of the market rather than one corner of it — construction, NHS, rail, utilities, public sector and the rest — and for every permanent role as well as contracts. Many of those adverts carry a plain job title, such as “Project Manager”, and say which market they are in only through the employer and the advert itself, which is why the sector is worked out separately from the role.

It covers 12 project management roles, from project manager and programme manager through scrum master, PMO manager, project director, project coordinator and PMO analyst, split by seniority where the advert’s title says so, and mapped to roughly 67 UK towns and cities plus remote.

Each advert is also placed in one of 13 sectors — Construction & Property, NHS & Healthcare, Rail, Utilities, Public Sector, Energy, Defence & Aerospace, Infrastructure & Highways, Pharma & Life Sciences, Engineering & Manufacturing, Financial Services, Education and IT & Digital — from its title, its employer and our job partner’s category, and only then from specific phrases in the description. The employer’s market comes before the job’s function: a digital role at an employer in one of the other sectors is placed in that sector, not in IT & Digital. An advert that does not say which market it is in gets no sector at all, because a wrong one would put the job, and its pay, in the wrong comparison.

Permanent roles are the main market, so they have a page of their own, and the permanent table leads the UK Project Management Pay Index.

It is narrow deliberately. A site that answers “what does a project manager earn in Manchester” precisely, with the sample size shown, is more use than one that tries to answer every question about every job in the country.

Where the jobs come from

Our job partner’s feed, and what applying actually does

The job adverts on this site come from our job partner’s job feed, not from us. Our job partner is a UK job board. We import their feed, tidy it up, work out which project management role, which sector and which city each advert belongs to, and publish it with a permanent address.

Clicking apply takes you to our job partner’s site, where you register an account with them. You leave this site at that point. Our job partner pays us a fee for each new candidate registration that arrives through one of our links. That fee is paid by our job partner, not by you: nothing on this site charges a candidate, and no money passes through it.

We never see your application, your CV or your details. Once you are on our job partner’s site, they are responsible for your data and their own terms apply. Registration with our job partner requires the right to work in the UK, so if you do not have it you will not be able to register or apply.

We do not vet employers or recruiters, we do not check that an advert is accurate, and we do not promise anyone work. Adverts can be filled or withdrawn before the feed tells us. When an advert closes, its address forwards to live adverts for the same role and place, so a link you saved never turns into a missing page.

Where the numbers come from

How the advertised-pay figures are worked out

Every pay figure on this site is computed from the salary fields of live job adverts. There is no survey, no panel and no model.

  1. Read what the advert states. An advert with no figure — “competitive”, “negotiable”, “depending on experience” — contributes nothing. It is counted in the total number of adverts and excluded from the pay statistics.
  2. Normalise to a year. A day rate is multiplied by 230 working days; an hourly rate by 7.5 hours a day and then by the same 230 days. Where an advert gives a range, the midpoint is used. Where the unit is unclear, or the figure is implausible for its unit, the advert is left out rather than guessed at.
  3. Summarise. For each role, and each role in each city, each sector, and each role in each sector, we record how many live adverts there are, how many of them state pay, and the 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile, minimum and maximum of those that do.
  4. Snapshot daily and keep it. Each day’s figures are written as a new record and never overwritten, which is what makes a month-on-month trend real rather than recomputed.

The honest caveats

What these numbers are not

  • They are advertised salaries, not paid salaries. They are what employers and recruiters put in adverts. What someone ends up on after negotiation is a different number, and we do not have it.
  • They are a sample of live adverts, not the labour market. Only adverts that reach our job partner’s feed and state a figure are in them.
  • Below 5 adverts stating pay we publish no figure. Instead the page says how many adverts there actually are, shows the national figure for comparison, and asks search engines not to index it — so we never rank for a number we cannot stand behind.
  • We never interpolate. A missing number is shown as missing. Nothing on this site is filled in from a neighbouring city or a similar role.
  • We do not set pay. No figure here is offered, guaranteed or negotiated by us, and nothing on this site is financial or career advice.

Counts

What “1,214 jobs” means

Every count on the site is a count of live adverts matching exactly what the page lists — the same filters that produced the rows underneath it. Closed adverts are not counted. A search result’s headline is the number of adverts in that result, not the number in some broader set.

Citing a figure

If you are quoting one of these numbers

Please quote the sample size and the date with it, because both are on the page for that reason. “The median advertised salary for a project manager in Leeds was £X, from N live adverts stating pay, as at DATE” is a claim that can be checked. “The average project manager salary is £X” is not, and it is not what this site says.

Corrections

Something wrong on a page

If an advert is misfiled under the wrong role, sector or city, or a figure looks wrong, tell us and we will look at it. The privacy policy names the controller and gives the contact address; the terms set out what this site does and does not do.