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 18 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
18 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 36 41 65
Rank change year-on-year +5 +24 +4
Contract jobs citing Validation 46 19 7
As % of all contract jobs in Birmingham 5.41% 3.26% 0.91%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 6.20% 3.61% 1.10%
Number of daily rates quoted 21 14 1
10th Percentile £322 £329 -
25th Percentile £358 £434 £415
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £470 £494 £430
Median % change year-on-year -4.81% +14.96% -4.56%
75th Percentile £600 £538 £444
90th Percentile £700 £708 -
West Midlands median daily rate £493 £490 £575
% change year-on-year +0.61% -14.87% +27.78%
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% +79.69%

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 742 526 635
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in Birmingham 87.29% 90.22% 82.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 455 358 400
10th Percentile £263 £200 £238
25th Percentile £402 £394 £374
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £525 £463
Median % change year-on-year -4.76% +13.51% -6.57%
75th Percentile £588 £625 £575
90th Percentile £660 £701 £675
West Midlands median daily rate £500 £513 £491
% change year-on-year -2.44% +4.33% -1.75%
Number of hourly rates quoted 34 12 44
10th Percentile £13.25 £14.70 £13.48
25th Percentile £16.08 £20.18 £18.50
Median hourly rate £18.87 £30.23 £28.50
Median % change year-on-year -37.57% +6.05% +112.09%
75th Percentile £23.58 £53.19 £67.50
90th Percentile £29.07 £57.05 £68.38
West Midlands median hourly rate £21.46 £20.12 £23.00
% change year-on-year +6.66% -12.52% +29.94%

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 18 February 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 4 (8.70%) Confluence
2 2 (4.35%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (4.35%) SAS
3 1 (2.17%) Apache
Applications
1 1 (2.17%) CANalyzer
1 1 (2.17%) Microsoft Project
Business Applications
1 1 (2.17%) Aareon QL
1 1 (2.17%) MIS ActiveH
1 1 (2.17%) NEC Housing
1 1 (2.17%) OPENHousing
1 1 (2.17%) Orchard Housing
1 1 (2.17%) Workday HCM
Cloud Services
1 10 (21.74%) AWS
2 5 (10.87%) Amazon S3
2 5 (10.87%) Azure
2 5 (10.87%) dbt
3 4 (8.70%) GCP
4 2 (4.35%) AWS Lambda
4 2 (4.35%) GitHub
4 2 (4.35%) GitHub Actions
4 2 (4.35%) Serverless
5 1 (2.17%) Cloud Composer
5 1 (2.17%) Dynamics 365
5 1 (2.17%) Google Kubernetes Engine
5 1 (2.17%) OpenShift
5 1 (2.17%) SuccessFactors
Communications & Networking
1 2 (4.35%) NAS
1 2 (4.35%) SAN
1 2 (4.35%) Wireless
Database & Business Intelligence
1 14 (30.43%) Elasticsearch
2 5 (10.87%) Amazon Redshift
2 5 (10.87%) Data Warehouse
3 3 (6.52%) Metadata
3 3 (6.52%) PostgreSQL
4 2 (4.35%) NoSQL
5 1 (2.17%) BigQuery
5 1 (2.17%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 5 (10.87%) JIRA
2 3 (6.52%) Cucumber
2 3 (6.52%) Git
2 3 (6.52%) Jenkins
2 3 (6.52%) JMeter
2 3 (6.52%) JUnit
2 3 (6.52%) Selenium
2 3 (6.52%) WebDriver
3 1 (2.17%) GitLab
3 1 (2.17%) Maven
3 1 (2.17%) SonarQube
General
1 27 (58.70%) Social Skills
2 25 (54.35%) Analytical Skills
3 7 (15.22%) Finance
4 5 (10.87%) Banking
4 5 (10.87%) Marketing
5 3 (6.52%) Public Sector
5 3 (6.52%) Telecoms
6 2 (4.35%) Documentation Skills
6 2 (4.35%) Investment Banking
6 2 (4.35%) Law
6 2 (4.35%) Legal
6 2 (4.35%) Manufacturing
6 2 (4.35%) Organisational Skills
7 1 (2.17%) Publishing
7 1 (2.17%) Social Housing
Job Titles
1 14 (30.43%) Site Engineer
1 14 (30.43%) Site Reliability Engineer
1 14 (30.43%) Splunk Engineer
2 10 (21.74%) Analyst
3 5 (10.87%) Lead
4 4 (8.70%) Consultant
4 4 (8.70%) Data Analyst
4 4 (8.70%) Senior
5 3 (6.52%) Architect
5 3 (6.52%) Data Engineer
5 3 (6.52%) Pega Architect
5 3 (6.52%) Pega Consultant
5 3 (6.52%) Senior Architect
5 3 (6.52%) Senior Consultant
6 2 (4.35%) Banking Analyst
6 2 (4.35%) Business Analyst
6 2 (4.35%) Firmware Engineer
6 2 (4.35%) Service Analyst
6 2 (4.35%) Tester
6 2 (4.35%) Unix Analyst
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (30.43%) Elastic Stack
2 5 (10.87%) REST
3 3 (6.52%) SOAP
3 3 (6.52%) Spring
3 3 (6.52%) WireMock
4 1 (2.17%) Apache Beam
4 1 (2.17%) JSON
4 1 (2.17%) Kafka
4 1 (2.17%) Middleware
4 1 (2.17%) SLSA
4 1 (2.17%) YAML
Miscellaneous
1 14 (30.43%) Management Information System
2 3 (6.52%) Distributed Systems
2 3 (6.52%) Product Ownership
2 3 (6.52%) Taxonomies
3 2 (4.35%) Credit Risk
3 2 (4.35%) Data Centre
3 2 (4.35%) Distributed Architecture
3 2 (4.35%) Hybrid Cloud
3 2 (4.35%) Legacy Systems
3 2 (4.35%) Operational Technology
3 2 (4.35%) Replication
3 2 (4.35%) Self-Motivation
4 1 (2.17%) Analytical Mindset
4 1 (2.17%) Cloud Native
4 1 (2.17%) Clustering
4 1 (2.17%) Data Structures
4 1 (2.17%) Distributed Applications
4 1 (2.17%) Driving Licence
4 1 (2.17%) Onboarding
Operating Systems
1 17 (36.96%) Linux
2 16 (34.78%) Unix
3 4 (8.70%) Windows
4 2 (4.35%) Debian
4 2 (4.35%) Embedded Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 24 (52.17%) Problem-Solving
2 22 (47.83%) Migration
3 20 (43.48%) Data Modelling
4 19 (41.30%) Observability
5 17 (36.96%) Dashboard Development
6 16 (34.78%) Change Management
6 16 (34.78%) Containerisation
6 16 (34.78%) DevOps
6 16 (34.78%) Knowledge Transfer
7 15 (32.61%) Data Ingestion
7 15 (32.61%) Incident Response
8 14 (30.43%) Computer Science
8 14 (30.43%) Performance Metrics
8 14 (30.43%) Proactive Monitoring
8 14 (30.43%) Site Reliability Engineering
9 9 (19.57%) Analytics
10 7 (15.22%) Agile
11 6 (13.04%) CI/CD
11 6 (13.04%) End-to-End Testing
12 5 (10.87%) Mentoring
Programming Languages
1 22 (47.83%) Python
2 14 (30.43%) Bash
3 9 (19.57%) SQL
4 2 (4.35%) C++
5 1 (2.17%) Groovy
5 1 (2.17%) Java
5 1 (2.17%) MATLAB
5 1 (2.17%) VBA
Qualifications
1 15 (32.61%) Degree
2 14 (30.43%) Computer Science Degree
3 5 (10.87%) Security Cleared
4 2 (4.35%) ITIL Certification
4 2 (4.35%) SC Cleared
5 1 (2.17%) PMI Certification
5 1 (2.17%) PMP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 6 (13.04%) Data Quality
1 6 (13.04%) QA
2 2 (4.35%) GMP
2 2 (4.35%) GxP
3 1 (2.17%) GDPR
System Software
1 17 (36.96%) Docker
2 2 (4.35%) Embedded Firmware
2 2 (4.35%) Firmware
Systems Management
1 18 (39.13%) Kubernetes
2 14 (30.43%) Ansible
2 14 (30.43%) Kibana
2 14 (30.43%) Puppet
3 3 (6.52%) Grafana
3 3 (6.52%) Prometheus
4 2 (4.35%) EMC NetWorker
4 2 (4.35%) Terraform
Vendors
1 16 (34.78%) Splunk
2 3 (6.52%) Cognos
2 3 (6.52%) Microsoft
2 3 (6.52%) Pega
3 2 (4.35%) Dell
3 2 (4.35%) Isilon
3 2 (4.35%) Remedy
3 2 (4.35%) Teradata
4 1 (2.17%) Aareon
4 1 (2.17%) AppDynamics
4 1 (2.17%) Capita
4 1 (2.17%) Civica
4 1 (2.17%) NEC
4 1 (2.17%) Northgate
4 1 (2.17%) Oneserve
4 1 (2.17%) Sage
4 1 (2.17%) SAP
4 1 (2.17%) Sonatype
4 1 (2.17%) Workday
4 1 (2.17%) Xero