This week I’ve been speculating on the Future of Work and the types of skills that might be required. However, hindsight can provide useful clues to the future, so it’s important to reflect on existing behavior in order to determine where we’re headed.
Between April and June of this year, online accounting service FreeAgent surveyed its users. The result is “The Freelancer Report,” an in-depth study of 535 freelancers and small businesses. Though the respondents were mainly based in the UK and the Netherlands, and the survey was primarily intended to understand the impact of the global recession, it provides some indications of trending behaviors and make for interesting reading. Read the rest of this entry »
“I’d rather keep working in the hope of getting paid than stop working and know I’m not going to get paid.” These words, from a friend of mine who’s not getting paid by the company she’s freelancing for — the only project she has right now — might shock you if you’re on a nice steady cashflow. But if your income isn’t so stable, you might be able to relate to her sense of desperation.
Though I know no one’s immune from a recession, this conversation made me think about my own approach to the financial side of what I do. I started to think about what, if anything, I could do to try to cushion myself from the current (and future) economic turmoil. Here’s what I came up with. Read the rest of this entry »
The very first LaidOffCamp — think BarCamp for those who have lost their jobs due to the recession — kicks off tomorrow, March 3, at 9 a.m. at Temple in San Francisco. It’s billed as “an ad-hoc gathering of unemployed and nontraditionally employed people (including freelancers, entrepreneurs and startups) who want to share ideas and learn from each other.” You don’t have to be unemployed to attend.
Over 20 discussion sessions are planned for the day on many topics that might be of interest to web workers, such as “Networking 101,” “Building Your Personal Brand” and “How to be a Freelance Consultant.” There should also be plenty of networking opportunities, including an after-party.
LaidOffCamp is being organized by recently laid off consultant Chris Hutchins. Tickets are free, although attendees are encouraged to make a donation that suits their budget. LaidOffCamp is expecting between 300 and 500 people to attend; according to the event’s Facebook page, there are more than 280 confirmed attendees so far.
Further events are planned in Dallas, New York and Miami, with more cities in the pipeline.
Are you planning on attending LaidOffCamp?
Image by sxc.hu user Zela
I called one of my friends earlier this week and asked her if we could have lunch on Sunday. I was surprised that she said she couldn’t make it, since she had to work. “What kind of evil forces are making you do this?” I asked her. Then again, who was I kidding? I was planning to write a couple of blog posts on Sunday evening. Like my friend, I was going to work during the weekend.
As I reviewed my own work habits, as well as those of other web workers, it became evident that working during the weekends is becoming more common.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: economic crisis, economic downturn, freelance, freelancing, Recession, second job, side job, side project, vacation, web work, web working, weekend, weekend work
Photo by _e.t.
I left my corporate job in June to strike out on my own as a freelance consultant working out of my home office and coffee shops. I had been preparing to make the move for a while, and it was something that I knew I wanted to try. The technology industry was growing and there were plenty of job openings in my field of expertise: online communities and social media. I left confident that I had plenty of time to test the waters as a freelance web worker knowing that I could always go back to the corporate world if freelance consulting didn’t work out for me.
I’m happy to say that consulting is working well for me right now, because I’m no longer confident that I could find a new corporate job as quickly or easily as I might have been able to get one a year ago.
The job market is getting tougher each month as unemployment continues to rise. At this point, I should emphasize that I am not an economist, employment guru or other expert qualified to analyze this data, so consider this just one web worker’s summary of the current economic conditions.
Let’s start with the recent employment data. Grim and depressing are the best ways I could come up with to describe the employment data that was released on Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor. Here are a few “highlights” from the report:
- Unemployment rose from 6.8 percent in November to 7.2 percent in December.
- The number of unemployed people in the U.S. is now 11.1 million up by 632,000 in December
- From the beginning of the recession in December 2007, unemployment has increased by 2.3 percent with 3.6 million additional people becoming unemployed.
However, this may not tell the whole story for those of us in various web working professions. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s no need to rehearse the latest round of bleak economic news once again. Now that it’s widely agreed that large parts of the world are in a recession, it’s time to focus our efforts on our core constituency: the web workers. Economic contraction is a mixed blessing for us. On the one hand, experience in working in an agile fashion, with the ability to draw on the worldwide internet for your clientele, is a big plus. But on the other, with traditional jobs vanishing for some people, there’s likely to be an influx of new web workers – leading to the potentially difficult scenario of too many web workers chasing too little work.
As a web worker who cares about your career, it’s just plain good sense to do what you can to make sure that your income survives increased competition. Fortunately, WWD has offered plenty of advice on that score over the years. Here are an even dozen of our best articles and tips for supercharging your career.
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With the world sliding into a real or imagined recession (sometimes, it’s difficult to tell!) Web Worker Daily has been on the look out for products, services and practices that might help remote workers weather the storm and perhaps feel confident in their own ability to not only save, but even make money in a downturn.
Something that caught my attention recently was Zilok’s peer-to-peer rental services. Zilok is at its heart a marketplace for users to either lend their items to others, or borrow items from other users.
Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
