Performance Optimisation Contract Job Trends in the West Midlands

Performance Optimisation
England > West Midlands

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the West Midlands requiring Performance Optimisation skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 11 February 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
11 Feb 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 120 90 -
Rank change year-on-year -30 - -
Contract jobs citing Performance Optimisation 25 7 0
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 0.98% 0.48% -
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.15% 0.54% -
Number of daily rates quoted 21 7 0
10th Percentile £358 £300 -
25th Percentile £406 £395 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £490 -
Median % change year-on-year +2.04% - -
75th Percentile £575 £538 -
90th Percentile £638 £553 -
England median daily rate £500 £550 £548
% change year-on-year -9.09% +0.46% -4.78%

All Process & Methodology Skills
West Midlands

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 West Midlands.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 2,167 1,301 1,593
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 85.15% 88.93% 83.89%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,405 815 1,040
10th Percentile £279 £210 £263
25th Percentile £402 £400 £388
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £500 £513 £500
Median % change year-on-year -2.44% +2.50% -
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £673 £700 £688
England median daily rate £500 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -4.76% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 81 49 108
10th Percentile £14.00 £14.66 £11.81
25th Percentile £16.25 £15.22 £16.89
Median hourly rate £21.46 £21.59 £23.00
Median % change year-on-year -0.60% -6.13% +29.94%
75th Percentile £27.21 £33.75 £48.75
90th Percentile £35.00 £52.50 £67.50
England median hourly rate £25.77 £35.00 £35.00
% change year-on-year -26.37% - -

Performance Optimisation
Job Vacancy Trend in the West Midlands

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

Performance Optimisation job vacancy trend in the West Midlands

Performance Optimisation
Daily Rate Trend in the West Midlands

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

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

Performance Optimisation
Daily Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Performance Optimisation in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 11 February 2026.

Daily rate histogram for Performance Optimisation in the West Midlands

Performance Optimisation
Hourly Rate Trend in the West Midlands

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

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

Performance Optimisation
Contract Job Locations in the West Midlands

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 West Midlands region over the 6 months to 11 February 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
Birmingham -5 11 £500 +66.67% 3
Coventry - 6 £275 -
Warwickshire - 5 £525 - 3
Shropshire - 1 £455 - 4
Staffordshire - 1 £550 - 1
Performance Optimisation
England

Performance Optimisation
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the West Midlands 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 3 (12.00%) Apache Airflow
Applications
1 1 (4.00%) Oracle Smart View
Cloud Services
1 11 (44.00%) AWS
2 7 (28.00%) Amazon S3
3 6 (24.00%) Azure
4 4 (16.00%) dbt
5 3 (12.00%) Amazon EMR
5 3 (12.00%) AWS CloudFormation
5 3 (12.00%) AWS Control Tower
5 3 (12.00%) AWS Lambda
5 3 (12.00%) OpenShift
5 3 (12.00%) Serverless
6 2 (8.00%) Azure Data Factory
6 2 (8.00%) GitHub
6 2 (8.00%) Power Platform
6 2 (8.00%) Snowflake
7 1 (4.00%) Azure Machine Learning
7 1 (4.00%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 1 (4.00%) Figma
7 1 (4.00%) OCI
7 1 (4.00%) Power Automate
7 1 (4.00%) PowerApps
Communications & Networking
1 4 (16.00%) DNS
2 2 (8.00%) DHCP
2 2 (8.00%) Firewall
2 2 (8.00%) Network Security
2 2 (8.00%) VPN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (28.00%) Amazon Redshift
2 4 (16.00%) MySQL
3 3 (12.00%) Amazon Athena
3 3 (12.00%) PostgreSQL
4 2 (8.00%) Power BI
5 1 (4.00%) Amazon RDS
5 1 (4.00%) Data Warehouse
5 1 (4.00%) Metadata
5 1 (4.00%) Oracle Database
5 1 (4.00%) Pentaho
5 1 (4.00%) Power Query
5 1 (4.00%) Relational Database
Development Applications
1 4 (16.00%) Git
2 2 (8.00%) Jenkins
3 1 (4.00%) Hudson
3 1 (4.00%) MLflow
3 1 (4.00%) REST Assured
3 1 (4.00%) Storybook
3 1 (4.00%) Visual Studio Code
3 1 (4.00%) Vite
3 1 (4.00%) webpack
General
1 12 (48.00%) Social Skills
2 5 (20.00%) Finance
3 2 (8.00%) Analytical Skills
3 2 (8.00%) Public Sector
4 1 (4.00%) Banking
4 1 (4.00%) Documentation Skills
4 1 (4.00%) Influencing Skills
4 1 (4.00%) Legal
4 1 (4.00%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 7 (28.00%) Architect
2 4 (16.00%) Data Engineer
3 3 (12.00%) AWS Architect
3 3 (12.00%) Data Architect
4 2 (8.00%) AWS Infrastructure Architect
4 2 (8.00%) Consultant
4 2 (8.00%) Developer
4 2 (8.00%) Infrastructure Architect
4 2 (8.00%) Network Engineer
4 2 (8.00%) Software Engineer
4 2 (8.00%) VMware Architect
5 1 (4.00%) Analyst
5 1 (4.00%) Angular Developer
5 1 (4.00%) Azure Data Engineer
5 1 (4.00%) Data Scientist
5 1 (4.00%) IFS Consultant
5 1 (4.00%) Lead
5 1 (4.00%) Senior
5 1 (4.00%) Senior Data Scientist
5 1 (4.00%) UI Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 4 (16.00%) AngularJS
1 4 (16.00%) REST
1 4 (16.00%) RESTful
2 3 (12.00%) AWS CDK
3 2 (8.00%) CSS
3 2 (8.00%) HTML
3 2 (8.00%) OpenTelemetry
3 2 (8.00%) Spring
3 2 (8.00%) Spring Boot
3 2 (8.00%) XML
4 1 (4.00%) CSS3
4 1 (4.00%) HTML5
4 1 (4.00%) JSON
4 1 (4.00%) Lightning Web Components
4 1 (4.00%) MACH
4 1 (4.00%) Oracle Fusion
4 1 (4.00%) SOAP
Miscellaneous
1 5 (20.00%) Cloud Native
2 3 (12.00%) SCADA
3 2 (8.00%) Hybrid Cloud
4 1 (4.00%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 2 (8.00%) Windows
1 2 (8.00%) Windows Server
2 1 (4.00%) Unix
Processes & Methodologies
1 9 (36.00%) CI/CD
2 8 (32.00%) Migration
3 7 (28.00%) Problem-Solving
4 6 (24.00%) Agile
4 6 (24.00%) Data Governance
4 6 (24.00%) Data Modelling
4 6 (24.00%) ETL
4 6 (24.00%) Stakeholder Management
5 5 (20.00%) High Availability
5 5 (20.00%) Software Engineering
6 4 (16.00%) Analytics
6 4 (16.00%) Containerisation
6 4 (16.00%) Data Engineering
6 4 (16.00%) Data Migration
6 4 (16.00%) Data Pipeline
6 4 (16.00%) DevOps
6 4 (16.00%) Front End Development
6 4 (16.00%) Load Balancing
6 4 (16.00%) Technical Leadership
7 3 (12.00%) Infrastructure as Code
Programming Languages
1 11 (44.00%) SQL
2 9 (36.00%) Python
3 2 (8.00%) Bash
3 2 (8.00%) Java
3 2 (8.00%) JavaScript
3 2 (8.00%) Kotlin
4 1 (4.00%) Apex Code
4 1 (4.00%) Data Analysis Expressions
4 1 (4.00%) PL/SQL
4 1 (4.00%) R
4 1 (4.00%) Shell Script
4 1 (4.00%) TypeScript
Qualifications
1 4 (16.00%) AWS Certification
2 3 (12.00%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
3 2 (8.00%) Security Cleared
4 1 (4.00%) BPSS Clearance
4 1 (4.00%) Degree
4 1 (4.00%) Master's Degree
4 1 (4.00%) PhD
4 1 (4.00%) SC Cleared
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (20.00%) Data Quality
2 3 (12.00%) Accessibility
2 3 (12.00%) GDPR
2 3 (12.00%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (12.00%) NIST
3 2 (8.00%) WCAG
4 1 (4.00%) FATCA
System Software
1 3 (12.00%) Docker
2 2 (8.00%) Active Directory
2 2 (8.00%) VMware Infrastructure
2 2 (8.00%) VMware NSX
2 2 (8.00%) vSphere
Systems Management
1 6 (24.00%) Kubernetes
1 6 (24.00%) Terraform
2 3 (12.00%) Ansible
3 2 (8.00%) Argo
3 2 (8.00%) Grafana
3 2 (8.00%) Microsoft Intune
3 2 (8.00%) vCenter Server
4 1 (4.00%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 5 (20.00%) Microsoft
2 3 (12.00%) Red Hat
3 2 (8.00%) Databricks
3 2 (8.00%) Oracle
3 2 (8.00%) Pure Storage
3 2 (8.00%) Splunk
3 2 (8.00%) VMware
4 1 (4.00%) Cadence
4 1 (4.00%) IFS
4 1 (4.00%) Sage
4 1 (4.00%) Salesforce
4 1 (4.00%) Talend