The Rise of the Freelancer

By 2030, will we all be our own boss?

An interesting article. I’ve often pondered going the freelance route as in my field (design) it’s already pretty common. The challenge is for people like me who have come to rely on the stability of a regular paycheck and a company responsible for benefits and sales generation, to make the transition to a freelance working model that can mean variable income/security, especially keeping a family budget in mind.

This is compounded by the fact that leaving an existing company can (especially in my/similar fields) make it at the very least sticky if not in some cases illegal for a person to work with clients after the fact that you had relationships with via your old job/position. In smaller marketplaces this can sometimes be the biggest inhibitor if you’re looking to transition from the conventional workplace to freelance as opposed to starting out freelance from the beginning.

In education, lifelong learning is more important than it ever used to be. The idea that you study in your youth and then have a career in one company is gone. Skills are changing all the time. There is a constant need to be reskilled. If you look at jobs in the marketplace today, you need some kind of renewal every five years or so.

I couldn’t agree with the above quote from the article more here. As someone who has worked in the design/marketing field in the advent of the web era, I have been pretty much forced to adapt from being only a print designer, to incorporating web and social/new media tools and knowledge into my skillset – primarily on my own.