Validation Contract Job Trends in Birmingham

Validation
West Midlands > Birmingham

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in Birmingham requiring Validation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 19 March 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Mar 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 24 35 63
Rank change year-on-year +11 +28 +12
Contract jobs citing Validation 57 16 3
As % of all contract jobs in Birmingham 6.70% 3.07% 0.39%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 7.92% 3.43% 0.47%
Number of daily rates quoted 33 11 0
10th Percentile £330 £397 -
25th Percentile £400 £444 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £425 £488 -
Median % change year-on-year -12.82% - -
75th Percentile £544 £559 -
90th Percentile £685 £638 -
West Midlands median daily rate £481 £494 £585
% change year-on-year -2.56% -15.60% +21.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 1
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £75.75 £47.50 -
Median hourly rate £76.50 £50.00 £14.00
Median % change year-on-year +53.00% +257.14% -
75th Percentile £77.25 £52.50 -
90th Percentile - - -
West Midlands median hourly rate £54.75 £50.00 £57.50
% change year-on-year +9.50% -13.04% -

All Process & Methodology Skills
Birmingham

Validation falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in Birmingham.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 720 467 637
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in Birmingham 84.61% 89.46% 83.38%
Number of daily rates quoted 450 334 418
10th Percentile £312 £190 £250
25th Percentile £405 £377 £373
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £500 £450
Median % change year-on-year - +11.11% -10.00%
75th Percentile £588 £604 £575
90th Percentile £651 £700 £666
West Midlands median daily rate £488 £500 £475
% change year-on-year -2.50% +5.26% -5.00%
Number of hourly rates quoted 27 14 44
10th Percentile £13.25 - £13.20
25th Percentile £16.05 £12.62 £17.75
Median hourly rate £20.00 £18.35 £27.25
Median % change year-on-year +8.99% -32.66% +67.33%
75th Percentile £25.00 £29.75 £48.75
90th Percentile £30.00 £30.68 £67.50
West Midlands median hourly rate £23.00 £18.13 £22.75
% change year-on-year +26.86% -20.31% +28.39%

Validation
Job Vacancy Trend in Birmingham

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Validation relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in Birmingham.

Validation job vacancy trend in Birmingham

Validation
Daily Rate Trend in Birmingham

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing Validation.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing Validation

Validation
Daily Rate Histogram in Birmingham

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Validation in Birmingham over the 6 months to 19 March 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Validation in Birmingham

Validation
Hourly Rate Trend in Birmingham

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing Validation.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in Birmingham citing Validation

Validation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in Birmingham 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:

Application Platforms
1 14 (24.56%) Confluence
2 3 (5.26%) SAS
3 2 (3.51%) Apache Airflow
4 1 (1.75%) Apache
Applications
1 1 (1.75%) CANalyzer
1 1 (1.75%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 1 (1.75%) Aareon QL
1 1 (1.75%) MIS ActiveH
1 1 (1.75%) NEC Housing
1 1 (1.75%) OPENHousing
1 1 (1.75%) Oracle EBS
1 1 (1.75%) Oracle ERP
1 1 (1.75%) Orchard Housing
1 1 (1.75%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 22 (38.60%) AWS
2 16 (28.07%) Azure
3 14 (24.56%) GCP
4 11 (19.30%) GitHub
4 11 (19.30%) GitHub Actions
5 6 (10.53%) Amazon S3
6 5 (8.77%) dbt
7 3 (5.26%) AWS Lambda
7 3 (5.26%) Serverless
8 1 (1.75%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 1 (1.75%) Amazon EC2
8 1 (1.75%) Amazon GuardDuty
8 1 (1.75%) AWS CloudTrail
8 1 (1.75%) Dynamics 365
8 1 (1.75%) Matillion
8 1 (1.75%) OpenShift
8 1 (1.75%) Power Platform
8 1 (1.75%) SaaS
8 1 (1.75%) Snowflake
8 1 (1.75%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 2 (3.51%) NAS
1 2 (3.51%) SAN
1 2 (3.51%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 13 (22.81%) PostgreSQL
2 10 (17.54%) Elasticsearch
3 6 (10.53%) Data Warehouse
4 5 (8.77%) Amazon Redshift
5 4 (7.02%) Metadata
6 3 (5.26%) NoSQL
7 2 (3.51%) Tableau
8 1 (1.75%) Amazon RDS
8 1 (1.75%) BigQuery
8 1 (1.75%) Oracle Reports
8 1 (1.75%) Power BI
8 1 (1.75%) SQL Server Integration Services
Development Applications
1 17 (29.82%) JIRA
2 13 (22.81%) Cucumber
2 13 (22.81%) Git
2 13 (22.81%) JMeter
2 13 (22.81%) JUnit
2 13 (22.81%) Selenium
2 13 (22.81%) WebDriver
3 12 (21.05%) Jenkins
4 7 (12.28%) GitLab
5 1 (1.75%) Burp Suite
5 1 (1.75%) Maven
5 1 (1.75%) Metasploit
5 1 (1.75%) Postman
5 1 (1.75%) SonarQube
5 1 (1.75%) sqlmap
General
1 32 (56.14%) Social Skills
2 22 (38.60%) Analytical Skills
3 9 (15.79%) Finance
4 6 (10.53%) Banking
4 6 (10.53%) Organisational Skills
5 5 (8.77%) Marketing
5 5 (8.77%) Public Sector
6 2 (3.51%) Documentation Skills
6 2 (3.51%) Investment Banking
6 2 (3.51%) Manufacturing
6 2 (3.51%) Telecoms
7 1 (1.75%) Billing
7 1 (1.75%) Law
7 1 (1.75%) Legal
7 1 (1.75%) Local Government
7 1 (1.75%) Publishing
7 1 (1.75%) Social Housing
Job Titles
1 11 (19.30%) Analyst
1 11 (19.30%) Tester
2 10 (17.54%) Senior
2 10 (17.54%) Site Engineer
2 10 (17.54%) Site Reliability Engineer
2 10 (17.54%) Splunk Engineer
3 9 (15.79%) Automation Tester
4 7 (12.28%) Lead
4 7 (12.28%) Senior Automation Tester
4 7 (12.28%) Senior Tester
5 5 (8.77%) Data Analyst
5 5 (8.77%) Data Engineer
6 4 (7.02%) Consultant
7 3 (5.26%) Automation Test Lead
7 3 (5.26%) Insight Analyst
7 3 (5.26%) Systems Tester
7 3 (5.26%) Test Leader
8 2 (3.51%) Data Insight Analyst
8 2 (3.51%) Insight Data Analyst
8 2 (3.51%) Unix Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 13 (22.81%) Spring
1 13 (22.81%) WireMock
2 10 (17.54%) Elastic Stack
3 5 (8.77%) REST
4 2 (3.51%) SOAP
5 1 (1.75%) Apache Beam
5 1 (1.75%) JSON
5 1 (1.75%) Kafka
5 1 (1.75%) Middleware
5 1 (1.75%) Oracle Fusion
5 1 (1.75%) SLSA
5 1 (1.75%) Swagger
5 1 (1.75%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 11 (19.30%) Distributed Systems
2 10 (17.54%) Distributed Architecture
2 10 (17.54%) Management Information System
3 3 (5.26%) Credit Risk
3 3 (5.26%) Distributed Applications
3 3 (5.26%) Legacy Systems
3 3 (5.26%) Self-Motivation
4 2 (3.51%) Data Centre
4 2 (3.51%) Hybrid Cloud
4 2 (3.51%) Operational Technology
4 2 (3.51%) Product Ownership
4 2 (3.51%) Replication
4 2 (3.51%) Taxonomies
5 1 (1.75%) Analytical Mindset
5 1 (1.75%) Cloud Native
5 1 (1.75%) Clustering
5 1 (1.75%) Data Structures
5 1 (1.75%) Driving Licence
Operating Systems
1 13 (22.81%) Linux
2 12 (21.05%) Unix
3 4 (7.02%) Windows
4 2 (3.51%) Debian
4 2 (3.51%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 24 (42.11%) Observability
2 20 (35.09%) Migration
3 19 (33.33%) Problem-Solving
4 17 (29.82%) CI/CD
5 16 (28.07%) Data Modelling
6 15 (26.32%) End-to-End Testing
7 14 (24.56%) Agile
7 14 (24.56%) Containerisation
7 14 (24.56%) DevOps
7 14 (24.56%) Digital Transformation Programme
7 14 (24.56%) Test Automation
8 13 (22.81%) BDD
8 13 (22.81%) Change Management
8 13 (22.81%) Continuous Improvement
8 13 (22.81%) Dashboard Development
8 13 (22.81%) Load Testing
8 13 (22.81%) Microservices
8 13 (22.81%) TDD
8 13 (22.81%) Test Strategy
9 12 (21.05%) Data Validation
Programming Languages
1 21 (36.84%) Python
2 14 (24.56%) SQL
3 10 (17.54%) Bash
4 2 (3.51%) C++
5 1 (1.75%) Groovy
5 1 (1.75%) Java
5 1 (1.75%) MATLAB
5 1 (1.75%) PL/SQL
5 1 (1.75%) VBA
Qualifications
1 14 (24.56%) Security Cleared
2 11 (19.30%) Degree
2 11 (19.30%) SC Cleared
3 10 (17.54%) Computer Science Degree
4 2 (3.51%) ITIL Certification
5 1 (1.75%) PMI Certification
5 1 (1.75%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 7 (12.28%) Data Quality
2 6 (10.53%) QA
3 2 (3.51%) GMP
3 2 (3.51%) GxP
4 1 (1.75%) GDPR
4 1 (1.75%) ISO/IEC 27001
4 1 (1.75%) NIST
4 1 (1.75%) PMO
4 1 (1.75%) SLA
System Software
1 23 (40.35%) Docker
2 2 (3.51%) Embedded Firmware
2 2 (3.51%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 24 (42.11%) Kubernetes
2 13 (22.81%) Grafana
2 13 (22.81%) Prometheus
3 10 (17.54%) Ansible
3 10 (17.54%) Kibana
3 10 (17.54%) Puppet
4 3 (5.26%) Terraform
5 2 (3.51%) EMC NetWorker
Vendors
1 11 (19.30%) Splunk
2 3 (5.26%) Cognos
2 3 (5.26%) Microsoft
2 3 (5.26%) Teradata
3 2 (3.51%) Dell
3 2 (3.51%) Isilon
3 2 (3.51%) Oracle
3 2 (3.51%) Pega
3 2 (3.51%) Remedy
3 2 (3.51%) ServiceNow
4 1 (1.75%) Aareon
4 1 (1.75%) Capita
4 1 (1.75%) Civica
4 1 (1.75%) Informatica
4 1 (1.75%) NEC
4 1 (1.75%) Northgate
4 1 (1.75%) Oneserve
4 1 (1.75%) Orchard
4 1 (1.75%) Sage
4 1 (1.75%) SAP