Virtual Machines Contract Job Trends in the West Midlands

Virtual Machine (VM)
England > West Midlands

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the West Midlands requiring Virtual Machines skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 10 November 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
10 Nov 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 135 83 105
Rank change year-on-year -52 +22 +57
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 3 30 17
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 0.15% 1.58% 0.87%
As % of the System Software category 0.79% 13.51% 5.50%
Number of daily rates quoted 3 18 16
10th Percentile £387 £366 £363
25th Percentile £431 £439 £391
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £508 £582 £550
Median % change year-on-year -12.80% +5.82% +46.67%
75th Percentile £574 £625 £738
90th Percentile £612 £638 £763
England median daily rate £503 £513 £525
% change year-on-year -1.95% -2.38% -4.55%

All System Software Skills
West Midlands

Virtual Machines falls under the System Software category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring system software skills in the West Midlands.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for system software skills 379 222 309
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 18.63% 11.71% 15.90%
Number of daily rates quoted 267 156 211
10th Percentile £223 £166 £163
25th Percentile £400 £299 £263
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £507 £500 £418
Median % change year-on-year +1.40% +19.76% +4.38%
75th Percentile £582 £613 £569
90th Percentile £675 £675 £700
England median daily rate £500 £515 £500
% change year-on-year -2.91% +3.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1 1 12
10th Percentile - - £17.53
25th Percentile £54.75 £31.25 £17.75
Median hourly rate £56.50 £32.50 £19.00
Median % change year-on-year +73.85% +71.05% -5.00%
75th Percentile £58.25 £33.75 £28.19
90th Percentile - - £28.75
England median hourly rate £30.00 £50.00 £43.75
% change year-on-year -40.00% +14.29% +84.21%

Virtual Machines
Job Vacancy Trend in the West Midlands

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

Virtual Machines job vacancy trend in the West Midlands

Virtual Machines
Daily Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Virtual Machines.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
Daily Rate Histogram in the West Midlands

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Virtual Machines in the West Midlands over the 6 months to 10 November 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Virtual Machines in the West Midlands

Virtual Machines
Hourly Rate Trend in the West Midlands

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Virtual Machines.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the West Midlands citing Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines
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 Virtual Machines within the West Midlands region over the 6 months to 10 November 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
Birmingham -8 1 £508 +26.88% 1
Warwickshire -31 1 £625 +6.84% 1
Virtual Machines
England

Virtual Machines
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 1 (33.33%) Apache
1 1 (33.33%) IIS
Cloud Services
1 2 (66.67%) Azure
2 1 (33.33%) Amazon CloudWatch
2 1 (33.33%) Amazon EC2
2 1 (33.33%) Amazon EventBridge
2 1 (33.33%) Amazon S3
2 1 (33.33%) AWS
2 1 (33.33%) AWS CloudTrail
2 1 (33.33%) AWS KMS
2 1 (33.33%) AWS Lambda
2 1 (33.33%) Azure DevOps
2 1 (33.33%) Route 53
2 1 (33.33%) Serverless
2 1 (33.33%) Virtual Private Cloud
Communications & Networking
1 1 (33.33%) DHCP
1 1 (33.33%) DNS
1 1 (33.33%) iSCSI
1 1 (33.33%) LAN
1 1 (33.33%) VLAN
1 1 (33.33%) VSAN
1 1 (33.33%) WAN
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (33.33%) Amazon RDS
1 1 (33.33%) Data Mining
1 1 (33.33%) OLTP
1 1 (33.33%) SQL Server
General
1 1 (33.33%) Analytical Skills
1 1 (33.33%) Finance
1 1 (33.33%) Law
Job Titles
1 1 (33.33%) Data Engineer
1 1 (33.33%) Infrastructure Engineer
1 1 (33.33%) IT Manager
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (33.33%) Middleware
1 1 (33.33%) OpenTelemetry
Miscellaneous
1 1 (33.33%) Algorithms
1 1 (33.33%) Linux Command Line
1 1 (33.33%) PKI
1 1 (33.33%) Replication
Operating Systems
1 2 (66.67%) Windows
2 1 (33.33%) Linux
2 1 (33.33%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
2 1 (33.33%) SUSE
2 1 (33.33%) Ubuntu
2 1 (33.33%) Windows Server
Processes & Methodologies
1 2 (66.67%) Migration
2 1 (33.33%) Actionable Insight
2 1 (33.33%) Agile
2 1 (33.33%) Analytics
2 1 (33.33%) Change Management
2 1 (33.33%) Data Architecture
2 1 (33.33%) Data Pipeline
2 1 (33.33%) Data Science
2 1 (33.33%) Data Visualisation
2 1 (33.33%) Decision-Making
2 1 (33.33%) DevOps
2 1 (33.33%) ETL
2 1 (33.33%) Infrastructure Engineering
2 1 (33.33%) Machine Learning
2 1 (33.33%) Predictive Modelling
2 1 (33.33%) Re-Platforming
2 1 (33.33%) Reverse Engineering
2 1 (33.33%) Statistical Analysis
2 1 (33.33%) Visualisation
2 1 (33.33%) Waterfall
Programming Languages
1 2 (66.67%) Java
2 1 (33.33%) PowerShell
2 1 (33.33%) Python
2 1 (33.33%) Scala
2 1 (33.33%) SQL
Qualifications
1 1 (33.33%) AWS Certification
1 1 (33.33%) AWS Certified SysOps Administrator
1 1 (33.33%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
System Software
1 1 (33.33%) Active Directory
1 1 (33.33%) VMware NSX
Systems Management
1 1 (33.33%) PowerCLI
1 1 (33.33%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 2 (66.67%) Microsoft
2 1 (33.33%) Guidewire
2 1 (33.33%) Veeam
2 1 (33.33%) VMware