Virtual Machines Contract Job Trends in Berkshire

Virtual Machine (VM)
South East > Berkshire

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in Berkshire requiring Virtual Machines skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 6 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
6 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 111 84 96
Rank change year-on-year -27 +12 +2
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 7 12 29
As % of all contract jobs in Berkshire 0.39% 0.96% 1.46%
As % of the System Software category 3.48% 6.03% 11.42%
Number of daily rates quoted 6 10 26
10th Percentile £506 - £364
25th Percentile £523 £350 £603
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £569 £422 £605
Median % change year-on-year +34.77% -30.25% +11.42%
75th Percentile £602 £564 £615
90th Percentile £616 £590 -
South East median daily rate £525 £490 £525
% change year-on-year +7.14% -6.67% -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile - - £24.34
Median hourly rate - - £25.12
75th Percentile - - £25.89
90th Percentile - - -
South East median hourly rate £58.50 - £25.12
% change year-on-year - - -64.12%

All System Software Skills
Berkshire

Virtual Machines falls under the System Software category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring system software skills in Berkshire.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for system software skills 201 199 254
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in Berkshire 11.22% 15.95% 12.78%
Number of daily rates quoted 146 127 181
10th Percentile £255 £231 £205
25th Percentile £350 £387 £275
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £500 £550
Median % change year-on-year -5.00% -9.09% +4.76%
75th Percentile £538 £638 £608
90th Percentile £608 £700 £663
South East median daily rate £500 £500 £475
% change year-on-year - +5.26% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 5 3 6
10th Percentile £74.80 - £21.65
25th Percentile £82.00 £55.87 £34.51
Median hourly rate £90.00 £56.75 £65.75
Median % change year-on-year +58.60% -13.70% -6.07%
75th Percentile £100.00 £57.62 £68.29
90th Percentile £103.30 - £68.63
South East median hourly rate £66.75 £57.75 £62.50
% change year-on-year +15.58% -7.60% +30.55%

Virtual Machines
Job Vacancy Trend in Berkshire

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Virtual Machines relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in Berkshire.

Virtual Machines job vacancy trend in Berkshire

Virtual Machines
Daily Rate Trend in Berkshire

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Berkshire citing Virtual Machines.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Berkshire citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
Hourly Rate Trend in Berkshire

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Berkshire citing Virtual Machines.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Berkshire citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
Contract Job Locations in Berkshire

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Virtual Machines within the Berkshire region over the 6 months to 6 March 2026. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
Reading -5 5 £575 +16.40%
Wokingham -36 2 £500 +42.86% 2
Virtual Machines
South East

Virtual Machines
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in Berkshire by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Cloud Services
1 6 (85.71%) Azure
2 5 (71.43%) AWS
3 3 (42.86%) Amazon EC2
3 3 (42.86%) Amazon S3
3 3 (42.86%) Azure Storage
3 3 (42.86%) Entra ID
3 3 (42.86%) IaaS
4 2 (28.57%) Azure Logic Apps
4 2 (28.57%) PaaS
5 1 (14.29%) Azure DevOps
5 1 (14.29%) GitHub
5 1 (14.29%) GitHub Actions
Communications & Networking
1 2 (28.57%) DHCP
1 2 (28.57%) DNS
1 2 (28.57%) FTP
1 2 (28.57%) SSL
2 1 (14.29%) Firewall
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (42.86%) Amazon RDS
1 3 (42.86%) Oracle Database
1 3 (42.86%) Oracle Reports
2 1 (14.29%) NoSQL
Development Applications
1 1 (14.29%) JIRA
General
1 2 (28.57%) Analytical Skills
1 2 (28.57%) Social Skills
2 1 (14.29%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 3 (42.86%) DBA
1 3 (42.86%) Oracle DBA
2 2 (28.57%) DevOps Engineer
3 1 (14.29%) Administrator
3 1 (14.29%) AWS DevOps
3 1 (14.29%) AWS DevOps Engineer
3 1 (14.29%) AWS Engineer
3 1 (14.29%) Cloud Engineer
3 1 (14.29%) Data Analytics Engineer
Miscellaneous
1 3 (42.86%) Cloud Native
2 1 (14.29%) Analytical Mindset
2 1 (14.29%) Enterprise Software
2 1 (14.29%) Linux Command Line
Operating Systems
1 5 (71.43%) Linux
2 3 (42.86%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 3 (42.86%) Windows
3 2 (28.57%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 5 (71.43%) CI/CD
1 5 (71.43%) DevOps
1 5 (71.43%) High Availability
2 4 (57.14%) Runbook
3 3 (42.86%) Performance Tuning
3 3 (42.86%) Statistics
3 3 (42.86%) Task Automation
4 2 (28.57%) Identity Management
4 2 (28.57%) Infrastructure Engineering
4 2 (28.57%) Operational Stability
4 2 (28.57%) Patch Management
4 2 (28.57%) Performance Monitoring
4 2 (28.57%) Problem-Solving
4 2 (28.57%) Server Management
4 2 (28.57%) Storage Management
4 2 (28.57%) Vulnerability Remediation
5 1 (14.29%) End-to-End Testing
5 1 (14.29%) Infrastructure as Code
5 1 (14.29%) RBAC
5 1 (14.29%) Verification and Validation
Programming Languages
1 5 (71.43%) SQL
2 3 (42.86%) Shell Script
3 2 (28.57%) Python
4 1 (14.29%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 3 (42.86%) Azure Certification
1 3 (42.86%) OCP
1 3 (42.86%) Oracle Certification
2 2 (28.57%) Security Cleared
3 1 (14.29%) AWS Certification
3 1 (14.29%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 3 (42.86%) GDPR
2 1 (14.29%) QA
System Software
1 3 (42.86%) Active Directory
2 2 (28.57%) Hyper-V
2 2 (28.57%) VMware ESXi
2 2 (28.57%) VMware Infrastructure
Systems Management
1 3 (42.86%) Data Guard
1 3 (42.86%) Oracle Enterprise Manager
1 3 (42.86%) Oracle RMAN
2 2 (28.57%) systemd
3 1 (14.29%) Kubernetes
3 1 (14.29%) Terraform
Vendors
1 3 (42.86%) Microsoft
1 3 (42.86%) Oracle
1 3 (42.86%) Red Hat
2 2 (28.57%) VMware
3 1 (14.29%) Databricks