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 3 April 2026, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
3 Apr 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 121 94 110
Rank change year-on-year -27 +16 +27
Contract jobs citing Performance Optimisation 39 2 2
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 1.33% 0.15% 0.10%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.58% 0.17% 0.12%
Number of daily rates quoted 34 2 1
10th Percentile £358 £530 -
25th Percentile £445 £538 -
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £494 £575 £360
Median % change year-on-year -14.13% +59.72% -44.62%
75th Percentile £572 £613 -
90th Percentile £626 £620 -
England median daily rate £505 £518 £575
% change year-on-year -2.51% -10.00% +6.98%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 0 1
Median hourly rate - - £55.00
England median hourly rate £75.00 £27.13 £57.57
% change year-on-year +176.50% -52.88% +10.44%

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 2,473 1,193 1,627
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 84.06% 89.10% 83.95%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,646 804 1,071
10th Percentile £305 £200 £275
25th Percentile £402 £388 £375
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £488 £500 £488
Median % change year-on-year -2.50% +2.56% -2.50%
75th Percentile £575 £594 £606
90th Percentile £650 £688 £725
England median daily rate £505 £525 £525
% change year-on-year -3.81% - -4.55%
Number of hourly rates quoted 87 53 117
10th Percentile £14.00 £12.32 £11.10
25th Percentile £16.17 £14.70 £14.00
Median hourly rate £25.00 £18.00 £22.50
Median % change year-on-year +38.89% -20.00% +26.98%
75th Percentile £47.50 £28.18 £38.75
90th Percentile £71.02 £34.75 £56.25
England median hourly rate £37.50 £32.50 £32.50
% change year-on-year +15.38% - -13.33%

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 3 April 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 3 April 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 - 13 £500 - 3
Coventry - 9 £431 - 1
Warwickshire - 6 £500 - 3
Shropshire - 5 £486 - 2
Staffordshire - 2 £431 - 4
Worcestershire - 2 £638 -
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 4 (10.26%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (5.13%) SAS
Business Applications
1 1 (2.56%) SAP ERP
1 1 (2.56%) SAP S/4HANA
Cloud Services
1 16 (41.03%) AWS
2 15 (38.46%) Azure
3 9 (23.08%) Amazon S3
4 6 (15.38%) GitHub
5 5 (12.82%) AWS Lambda
5 5 (12.82%) OpenShift
5 5 (12.82%) Power Platform
5 5 (12.82%) Serverless
6 4 (10.26%) AWS CloudFormation
6 4 (10.26%) Azure Data Factory
6 4 (10.26%) dbt
7 3 (7.69%) Amazon EMR
7 3 (7.69%) AWS Control Tower
7 3 (7.69%) Azure DevOps
7 3 (7.69%) Azure Machine Learning
7 3 (7.69%) Azure Synapse Analytics
7 3 (7.69%) Snowflake
8 2 (5.13%) Amazon SQS
9 1 (2.56%) SuccessFactors
9 1 (2.56%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 5 (12.82%) DNS
2 3 (7.69%) Firewall
2 3 (7.69%) Network Security
3 2 (5.13%) DHCP
3 2 (5.13%) VPN
4 1 (2.56%) Cisco Nexus
4 1 (2.56%) Ethernet VPN
4 1 (2.56%) Fibre Channel
4 1 (2.56%) HSRP
4 1 (2.56%) iSCSI
4 1 (2.56%) Multicast
4 1 (2.56%) NAS
4 1 (2.56%) NetScaler
4 1 (2.56%) OSPF
4 1 (2.56%) SAN
4 1 (2.56%) SD-WAN
4 1 (2.56%) SSL
4 1 (2.56%) VLAN
4 1 (2.56%) VXLAN
4 1 (2.56%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (17.95%) Amazon Redshift
2 5 (12.82%) Power BI
3 4 (10.26%) MySQL
3 4 (10.26%) PostgreSQL
4 3 (7.69%) Amazon Athena
5 2 (5.13%) Amazon RDS
5 2 (5.13%) Data Warehouse
5 2 (5.13%) Metadata
5 2 (5.13%) Relational Database
6 1 (2.56%) Data Lake
6 1 (2.56%) DynamoDB
6 1 (2.56%) NoSQL
6 1 (2.56%) Oracle Database
6 1 (2.56%) Pentaho
6 1 (2.56%) Power Query
6 1 (2.56%) SAS Data Integration Studio
6 1 (2.56%) Snowflake Schema
6 1 (2.56%) Star Schema
Development Applications
1 7 (17.95%) Git
2 3 (7.69%) Jenkins
2 3 (7.69%) MLflow
3 2 (5.13%) GitLab
3 2 (5.13%) Hudson
4 1 (2.56%) REST Assured
4 1 (2.56%) Sonatype Nexus
4 1 (2.56%) Storybook
4 1 (2.56%) Visual Studio Code
4 1 (2.56%) Vite
4 1 (2.56%) webpack
General
1 16 (41.03%) Social Skills
2 5 (12.82%) Finance
3 2 (5.13%) Analytical Skills
3 2 (5.13%) Banking
3 2 (5.13%) Public Sector
3 2 (5.13%) Retail
4 1 (2.56%) Documentation Skills
4 1 (2.56%) Influencing Skills
4 1 (2.56%) Legal
4 1 (2.56%) Presentation Skills
Job Titles
1 12 (30.77%) Architect
2 7 (17.95%) Data Engineer
2 7 (17.95%) Senior
3 4 (10.26%) Data Architect
3 4 (10.26%) Developer
4 3 (7.69%) Analyst
4 3 (7.69%) AWS Architect
4 3 (7.69%) Data Analyst
4 3 (7.69%) Lead
5 2 (5.13%) AWS Infrastructure Architect
5 2 (5.13%) Azure Data Engineer
5 2 (5.13%) Azure Engineer
5 2 (5.13%) Consultant
5 2 (5.13%) Infrastructure Architect
5 2 (5.13%) Pega Architect
5 2 (5.13%) SAS Engineer
5 2 (5.13%) Senior Analyst
5 2 (5.13%) Senior Data Analyst
5 2 (5.13%) Senior Data Engineer
5 2 (5.13%) Systems Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 5 (12.82%) REST
1 5 (12.82%) RESTful
2 4 (10.26%) AngularJS
3 3 (7.69%) AWS CDK
3 3 (7.69%) OpenTelemetry
4 2 (5.13%) CSS
4 2 (5.13%) HTML
4 2 (5.13%) Node.js
4 2 (5.13%) SOAP
4 2 (5.13%) Spring
4 2 (5.13%) Spring Boot
4 2 (5.13%) XML
5 1 (2.56%) CSS3
5 1 (2.56%) HTML5
5 1 (2.56%) JMS
5 1 (2.56%) JSON
5 1 (2.56%) Lightning Web Components
5 1 (2.56%) MACH
5 1 (2.56%) React
Miscellaneous
1 9 (23.08%) Cloud Native
2 4 (10.26%) Hybrid Cloud
3 3 (7.69%) SCADA
4 2 (5.13%) Product Ownership
5 1 (2.56%) Data Centre
5 1 (2.56%) Distributed Systems
5 1 (2.56%) Enterprise Cloud
5 1 (2.56%) Enterprise Storage
5 1 (2.56%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 2 (5.13%) Unix
1 2 (5.13%) Windows
1 2 (5.13%) Windows Server
2 1 (2.56%) Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 20 (51.28%) CI/CD
2 15 (38.46%) Migration
3 11 (28.21%) Agile
3 11 (28.21%) DevOps
4 10 (25.64%) Data Modelling
4 10 (25.64%) ETL
5 9 (23.08%) Containerisation
5 9 (23.08%) Data Governance
5 9 (23.08%) Problem-Solving
6 8 (20.51%) Data Pipeline
6 8 (20.51%) High Availability
7 7 (17.95%) Data Engineering
7 7 (17.95%) Software Engineering
7 7 (17.95%) Stakeholder Management
7 7 (17.95%) Technical Leadership
8 6 (15.38%) Analytics
8 6 (15.38%) Infrastructure as Code
8 6 (15.38%) Load Balancing
9 5 (12.82%) Performance Tuning
9 5 (12.82%) User Experience
Programming Languages
1 15 (38.46%) SQL
2 13 (33.33%) Python
3 3 (7.69%) Bash
4 2 (5.13%) Java
4 2 (5.13%) JavaScript
4 2 (5.13%) Kotlin
4 2 (5.13%) PL/SQL
4 2 (5.13%) Shell Script
4 2 (5.13%) TypeScript
5 1 (2.56%) Apex Code
5 1 (2.56%) Data Analysis Expressions
5 1 (2.56%) R
Qualifications
1 4 (10.26%) AWS Certification
1 4 (10.26%) Security Cleared
2 3 (7.69%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
2 3 (7.69%) Degree
2 3 (7.69%) Master's Degree
2 3 (7.69%) PhD
2 3 (7.69%) SC Cleared
3 1 (2.56%) BPSS Clearance
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 8 (20.51%) Data Quality
2 3 (7.69%) GDPR
2 3 (7.69%) ISO/IEC 27001
2 3 (7.69%) NIST
3 2 (5.13%) Accessibility
3 2 (5.13%) QA
3 2 (5.13%) WCAG
4 1 (2.56%) FATCA
System Software
1 6 (15.38%) Docker
2 3 (7.69%) VMware Infrastructure
2 3 (7.69%) VMware NSX
2 3 (7.69%) vSphere
3 2 (5.13%) Active Directory
4 1 (2.56%) Firmware
4 1 (2.56%) NFS
Systems Management
1 11 (28.21%) Kubernetes
2 8 (20.51%) Terraform
3 5 (12.82%) Ansible
4 4 (10.26%) Grafana
5 3 (7.69%) Argo
5 3 (7.69%) vCenter Server
6 2 (5.13%) Microsoft Intune
7 1 (2.56%) Prometheus
Vendors
1 7 (17.95%) Microsoft
2 6 (15.38%) Databricks
3 4 (10.26%) Pure Storage
3 4 (10.26%) Red Hat
4 3 (7.69%) Oracle
4 3 (7.69%) Splunk
4 3 (7.69%) VMware
5 2 (5.13%) Cisco
5 2 (5.13%) Pega
5 2 (5.13%) Talend
6 1 (2.56%) AppDynamics
6 1 (2.56%) Cadence
6 1 (2.56%) Dell
6 1 (2.56%) Denodo
6 1 (2.56%) Dynatrace
6 1 (2.56%) IFS
6 1 (2.56%) Informatica
6 1 (2.56%) Meraki
6 1 (2.56%) SAP
6 1 (2.56%) SolarWinds