Performance Optimisation Contract Job Trends in the North West

Performance Optimisation
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North West requiring Performance Optimisation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 4 October 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
4 Oct 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 102 115 126
Rank change year-on-year +13 +11 +53
Contract jobs citing Performance Optimisation 32 8 18
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 1.46% 0.33% 0.63%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.65% 0.40% 0.72%
Number of daily rates quoted 30 8 17
10th Percentile £358 £356 £381
25th Percentile £370 £375 £450
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £460 £415 £500
Median % change year-on-year +10.85% -17.05% +35.14%
75th Percentile £488 £438 £613
90th Percentile £492 £513 £656
England median daily rate £485 £560 £525
% change year-on-year -13.39% +6.67% -8.70%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 0 0
10th Percentile - - -
25th Percentile £26.00 - -
Median hourly rate £27.00 - -
75th Percentile £28.00 - -
90th Percentile - - -
England median hourly rate £50.50 £30.00 £75.00
% change year-on-year +68.33% -60.00% +36.36%

All Process and Methodology Skills
North West

Performance Optimisation 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 the North West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 1,943 2,013 2,514
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 88.52% 83.60% 87.69%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,289 1,106 1,708
10th Percentile £268 £297 £270
25th Percentile £363 £400 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £480 £500
Median % change year-on-year -6.25% -4.00% -
75th Percentile £575 £575 £595
90th Percentile £681 £669 £675
England median daily rate £512 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -2.48% -4.55% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 138 110 167
10th Percentile £13.75 £16.48 £15.75
25th Percentile £17.30 £28.75 £17.75
Median hourly rate £25.15 £42.50 £33.00
Median % change year-on-year -40.84% +28.79% +41.63%
75th Percentile £47.12 £62.50 £46.18
90th Percentile £67.25 £73.66 £67.75
England median hourly rate £25.15 £43.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -41.51% -3.37% +41.67%

Performance Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Performance Optimisation relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West.

Performance Optimisation job vacancy trend in the North West

Performance Optimisation
Daily Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Performance Optimisation.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Performance Optimisation

Performance Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Performance Optimisation in the North West over the 6 months to 4 October 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Performance Optimisation in the North West

Performance Optimisation
Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Performance Optimisation.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Performance Optimisation

Performance Optimisation
Contract Job Locations in the North West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Performance Optimisation within the North West region over the 6 months to 4 October 2025. 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
Cheshire -1 23 £460 +28.76%
Manchester +3 7 £418 -1.76% 22
Lancashire - 1 £400 - 20
Performance Optimisation
England

Performance Optimisation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North West 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 5 (15.63%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (6.25%) Apache
3 1 (3.13%) Apache Spark
3 1 (3.13%) Confluence
3 1 (3.13%) nginx
3 1 (3.13%) SharePoint
3 1 (3.13%) Tomcat
Business Applications
1 1 (3.13%) Advent Geneva
Cloud Services
1 12 (37.50%) AWS
2 10 (31.25%) Azure
2 10 (31.25%) GitHub
3 6 (18.75%) GCP
3 6 (18.75%) npm
4 3 (9.38%) AWS Lambda
4 3 (9.38%) GitHub Actions
4 3 (9.38%) Serverless
5 2 (6.25%) AWS Step Functions
5 2 (6.25%) Azure DevOps
5 2 (6.25%) Figma
6 1 (3.13%) Amazon S3
6 1 (3.13%) Amazon SageMaker
6 1 (3.13%) Amazon SQS
6 1 (3.13%) AWS CloudFormation
6 1 (3.13%) Azure Data Factory
6 1 (3.13%) Azure Machine Learning
6 1 (3.13%) Microsoft 365
6 1 (3.13%) OneDrive
6 1 (3.13%) Power Platform
Communications & Networking
1 4 (12.50%) BGP
1 4 (12.50%) Firewall
1 4 (12.50%) MPLS
1 4 (12.50%) Network Security
1 4 (12.50%) OSPF
1 4 (12.50%) VLAN
1 4 (12.50%) VPN
2 3 (9.38%) HTTPS
3 1 (3.13%) SAN
3 1 (3.13%) WAN
3 1 (3.13%) Wi-Fi
Database & Business Intelligence
1 3 (9.38%) Amazon Redshift
2 2 (6.25%) Big Data
2 2 (6.25%) Data Lake
3 1 (3.13%) Azure SQL Database
3 1 (3.13%) Data Warehouse
3 1 (3.13%) DB2
3 1 (3.13%) Delta Lake
3 1 (3.13%) Hadoop
3 1 (3.13%) Metadata
3 1 (3.13%) MySQL
3 1 (3.13%) Parquet
3 1 (3.13%) Power BI
3 1 (3.13%) Relational Database
3 1 (3.13%) SQL Server
3 1 (3.13%) SQL Server Reporting Services
3 1 (3.13%) Tableau
Development Applications
1 13 (40.63%) Git
2 7 (21.88%) Jenkins
3 6 (18.75%) Cypress.io
3 6 (18.75%) GitLab
3 6 (18.75%) Grunt
3 6 (18.75%) gulp
3 6 (18.75%) JIRA
3 6 (18.75%) SonarQube
4 5 (15.63%) Cucumber
4 5 (15.63%) JUnit
5 2 (6.25%) Gradle
5 2 (6.25%) Storybook
5 2 (6.25%) Visual Studio Code
5 2 (6.25%) Xcode
6 1 (3.13%) Gerrit
6 1 (3.13%) MLflow
6 1 (3.13%) Subversion
General
1 4 (12.50%) Analytical Skills
1 4 (12.50%) Social Skills
2 3 (9.38%) Public Sector
3 1 (3.13%) Aerospace
3 1 (3.13%) Documentation Skills
3 1 (3.13%) Finance
3 1 (3.13%) Manufacturing
3 1 (3.13%) Military
Job Titles
1 16 (50.00%) Developer
2 6 (18.75%) Java Developer
2 6 (18.75%) UI Developer
3 4 (12.50%) Data Engineer
3 4 (12.50%) Designer
3 4 (12.50%) Network Designer
3 4 (12.50%) Solutions Designer
4 3 (9.38%) ForgeRock Engineer
4 3 (9.38%) React Developer
4 3 (9.38%) Software Engineer
5 2 (6.25%) AWS Developer
6 1 (3.13%) Automation Engineer
6 1 (3.13%) AWS DevOps
6 1 (3.13%) AWS Engineer
6 1 (3.13%) Azure Engineer
6 1 (3.13%) ICT Engineer
6 1 (3.13%) ICT Infrastructure Engineer
6 1 (3.13%) Industrial Engineer
6 1 (3.13%) Lead DevOps
6 1 (3.13%) Machine Learning Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 12 (37.50%) React
2 11 (34.38%) REST
3 8 (25.00%) CSS
3 8 (25.00%) HTML
3 8 (25.00%) HTML5
4 7 (21.88%) CSS3
4 7 (21.88%) Kafka
4 7 (21.88%) Sass
5 6 (18.75%) Ajax
5 6 (18.75%) Enzyme
5 6 (18.75%) Jest
5 6 (18.75%) JSON
5 6 (18.75%) LESS
5 6 (18.75%) Nightwatchjs
5 6 (18.75%) Node.js
5 6 (18.75%) Redux
5 6 (18.75%) Spring
5 6 (18.75%) Spring Boot
6 5 (15.63%) OAuth
6 5 (15.63%) RESTful
Miscellaneous
1 4 (12.50%) Hybrid Cloud
2 3 (9.38%) Mobile App
2 3 (9.38%) PKI
2 3 (9.38%) Taxonomies
2 3 (9.38%) Virtual Team
3 1 (3.13%) Cloud Native
3 1 (3.13%) Data Centre
3 1 (3.13%) Distributed Computing
3 1 (3.13%) Enterprise Software
3 1 (3.13%) Greenfield Project
3 1 (3.13%) Industrial Internet of Things
3 1 (3.13%) Legacy Systems
3 1 (3.13%) SCADA
Operating Systems
1 2 (6.25%) Android
1 2 (6.25%) Apple iOS
Processes & Methodologies
1 11 (34.38%) Agile
2 9 (28.13%) CI/CD
3 8 (25.00%) Mentoring
3 8 (25.00%) Problem-Solving
3 8 (25.00%) Scrum
3 8 (25.00%) TDD
3 8 (25.00%) Unit Testing
4 7 (21.88%) Front End Development
5 6 (18.75%) API Integration
5 6 (18.75%) Artificial Intelligence
5 6 (18.75%) Migration
5 6 (18.75%) Release Management
5 6 (18.75%) Test Automation
6 5 (15.63%) Clean Code
6 5 (15.63%) Code Quality
6 5 (15.63%) Computer Science
6 5 (15.63%) DevOps
6 5 (15.63%) Microservices
6 5 (15.63%) Sprint Planning
6 5 (15.63%) Sprint Retrospective
Programming Languages
1 10 (31.25%) Java
1 10 (31.25%) JavaScript
1 10 (31.25%) SQL
2 8 (25.00%) Python
3 3 (9.38%) TypeScript
4 1 (3.13%) PowerShell
4 1 (3.13%) Scala
Qualifications
1 6 (18.75%) BPSS Clearance
1 6 (18.75%) Security Cleared
2 5 (15.63%) Computer Science Degree
2 5 (15.63%) Degree
2 5 (15.63%) Master's Degree
3 4 (12.50%) CCIE
3 4 (12.50%) CCNP
3 4 (12.50%) Cisco Certification
3 4 (12.50%) JNCIE
4 1 (3.13%) AWS Certification
4 1 (3.13%) Azure Certification
4 1 (3.13%) Tableau Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 10 (31.25%) Accessibility
2 5 (15.63%) QA
3 2 (6.25%) Data Quality
4 1 (3.13%) WCAG
System Software
1 5 (15.63%) Docker
Systems Management
1 3 (9.38%) Kubernetes
1 3 (9.38%) Single Sign-On
1 3 (9.38%) Terraform
2 2 (6.25%) Control-M
3 1 (3.13%) MOM
3 1 (3.13%) Wonderware InTouch
Vendors
1 6 (18.75%) Microsoft
1 6 (18.75%) Perforce
2 4 (12.50%) Cisco
2 4 (12.50%) F5
2 4 (12.50%) Fortinet
3 3 (9.38%) ForgeRock
3 3 (9.38%) Ping Identity
4 2 (6.25%) Databricks
4 2 (6.25%) Oracle
5 1 (3.13%) Advent
5 1 (3.13%) AVEVA
5 1 (3.13%) ServiceNow
5 1 (3.13%) Wonderware