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

6 months to
10 May 2026
Same period 2025 Same period 2024
Rank 142 78 102
Rank change year-on-year -64 +24 +9
Contract jobs citing Virtual Machines 12 18 10
As % of all contract jobs in the West Midlands 0.38% 1.32% 0.52%
As % of the System Software category 3.18% 9.73% 6.58%
Number of daily rates quoted 6 13 10
10th Percentile £319 £363 £164
25th Percentile £325 £413 £381
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £375 £500 £400
Median % change year-on-year -25.00% +25.00% +6.67%
75th Percentile £444 £519 £537
90th Percentile £475 £565 £600
England median daily rate £500 £525 £513
% change year-on-year -4.76% +2.44% -5.62%

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 377 185 152
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the West Midlands 11.89% 13.52% 7.93%
Number of daily rates quoted 244 126 114
10th Percentile £258 £153 £178
25th Percentile £340 £226 £238
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £475 £476 £400
Median % change year-on-year -0.11% +18.88% -15.79%
75th Percentile £550 £650 £569
90th Percentile £615 £700 £675
England median daily rate £500 £525 £500
% change year-on-year -4.76% +5.00% -4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 7 5 5
10th Percentile £42.50 - £14.59
25th Percentile £50.47 £15.22 £15.65
Median hourly rate £63.14 £18.13 £16.00
Median % change year-on-year +248.23% +13.31% -9.69%
75th Percentile £71.42 - £19.95
90th Percentile £76.00 £32.44 £22.23
England median hourly rate £57.77 £28.21 £21.00
% change year-on-year +104.80% +34.31% -58.00%

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 May 2026.

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 May 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 -23 7 £463 -7.50% 3
Warwickshire -23 5 £325 -23.53%
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:

Business Applications
1 1 (8.33%) SAP SD
Cloud Services
1 6 (50.00%) OpenShift
2 4 (33.33%) Azure
3 1 (8.33%) Azure AKS
3 1 (8.33%) Azure DevOps
3 1 (8.33%) Nutanix
Communications & Networking
1 3 (25.00%) Firewall
1 3 (25.00%) SSL
2 1 (8.33%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 1 (8.33%) PostgreSQL
General
1 2 (16.67%) Finance
2 1 (8.33%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 5 (41.67%) Product Owner
2 3 (25.00%) Lead
3 1 (8.33%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
3 1 (8.33%) Consultant
3 1 (8.33%) Data Engineer
3 1 (8.33%) Data Scientist
3 1 (8.33%) Functional Consultant
3 1 (8.33%) Infrastructure Engineer
3 1 (8.33%) SAP Consultant
3 1 (8.33%) SAP Functional Consultant
3 1 (8.33%) SAP SD Consultant
3 1 (8.33%) SAP SD Functional Consultant
3 1 (8.33%) Senior
3 1 (8.33%) Senior Infrastructure Engineer
3 1 (8.33%) VMware Engineer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 1 (8.33%) Hugging Face
1 1 (8.33%) OpenCV
1 1 (8.33%) PyTorch
1 1 (8.33%) Regular Expression
1 1 (8.33%) SpaCy
1 1 (8.33%) TensorFlow
Miscellaneous
1 5 (41.67%) Product Ownership
2 3 (25.00%) SCADA
3 1 (8.33%) Data Centre
3 1 (8.33%) Onboarding
3 1 (8.33%) Self-Motivation
Operating Systems
1 4 (33.33%) Windows
1 4 (33.33%) Windows Server
2 3 (25.00%) Linux
3 1 (8.33%) VMS
3 1 (8.33%) Windows Server 2012
3 1 (8.33%) Windows Server 2019
Processes & Methodologies
1 9 (75.00%) Performance Tuning
2 7 (58.33%) Migration
3 5 (41.67%) Product Vision
3 5 (41.67%) RBAC
3 5 (41.67%) Secrets Management
4 4 (33.33%) Change Management
4 4 (33.33%) Network Virtualisation
5 3 (25.00%) Identity Access Management
5 3 (25.00%) Service Management
5 3 (25.00%) Storage Management
5 3 (25.00%) Vulnerability Remediation
6 2 (16.67%) High Availability
6 2 (16.67%) ITSM
6 2 (16.67%) Problem Management
6 2 (16.67%) Server Patching
6 2 (16.67%) Technology Transformation
7 1 (8.33%) Change Control
7 1 (8.33%) Image Processing
7 1 (8.33%) Natural Language Processing
7 1 (8.33%) SIEM
Programming Languages
1 3 (25.00%) PL/SQL
1 3 (25.00%) SQL
2 2 (16.67%) Python
3 1 (8.33%) PowerShell
Qualifications
1 3 (25.00%) SC Cleared
1 3 (25.00%) Security Cleared
2 1 (8.33%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
System Software
1 5 (41.67%) Ceph
1 5 (41.67%) VMware Infrastructure
2 4 (33.33%) Active Directory
3 2 (16.67%) vSphere
4 1 (8.33%) Hyper-V
4 1 (8.33%) KVM
4 1 (8.33%) VMware ESXi
Systems Management
1 1 (8.33%) Ansible
1 1 (8.33%) Kubernetes
1 1 (8.33%) PowerCLI
1 1 (8.33%) SCOM
1 1 (8.33%) vCenter Server
Vendors
1 5 (41.67%) VMware
2 3 (25.00%) Microsoft
2 3 (25.00%) Oracle
3 1 (8.33%) Cisco
3 1 (8.33%) SAP