PODCAST 7 Is contracting right for you Listen to our tips and advice Viewpoint careers advice blog

PODCAST 7 Is contracting right for you Listen to our tips and advice Contracting is becoming more and more popular among professionals. To learn more about contracting and whether this could be a career path for you, listen to our podcast with Travis O’Rourke, Head of Hays Talent Solutions in Canada, our outsourced recruitment business. Podcast notes: Could you please explain what contracting is and how it differs from temp work? I look at all this new type of work, assignment based work, as being flexible work. Flexible work typically has two different kinds â€" contracting and temporary. Temporary might be for a day or a week or a month, and you might not know you’re going to have the assignment until the morning of the actual day. Contracting tends to be much more deliberate, where you’re going to have a set start date and a set end date, typically over a defined length of time, and you’ll know it’s coming down the pipe. Read more: 3 reasons to consider contracting In what industries or fields of work is contracting most common? These days IT is easily the most common. Obviously it’s been big in construction for many years but IT, I would say,  is now comprising of 50 or 60 per cent of the contracting space. Within that you can break it a little bit further down into digital and marketing. These days the line between marketing and IT is bleeding together quite closely. Education and finance are also quite common as well. What are the main benefits of contracting over permanent work? The freedom. In a contracting role you are more likely to be offered more remote accesses, more flexibility as to when you start and complete your work. It allows you the flexibility to work when you’d like, and how you would like to do it. There’s also a lot of increased income potential opportunities, they’ll be paying more for your flexibility and your skill set, rather than for your management capabilities. It’s typically you on your own doing what you do best. It allows you to take control of your career, you can select only the assignments that appeal for you. You can essentially play with your resume, and give yourself experience into new technologies or new environments and new industries that you wouldn’t have had if you stayed in the same job for 15 years. It can give you a quick career boost, a lot of the time individuals will look at taking a sabbatical, to get exposed to something different. With contracting you’re there to show up, do the best work that you can and then leave once the job is complete. Of course, you want to get a reference afterwards, but it allows you to focus just on the task at hand. Networking. Networking is the number one way that most individuals find a job, and when you work in contracting you are able to get exposure to more companies and people, and the amount of credibility that you’re going to be able to build up in your specialism is second to none compared to what you would get in a permanent role. In a permanent job for the most part you are surrounded by the same individuals every day. What are the benefits to businesses when it comes to using contractors? For me, the number one is bringing in new skills. Take IT for example, if you are installing a new piece of technology, lets say youre putting in SAP, chances are you dont have employees who are familiar with SAP because when you hired them you didn’t have the system in place. So bringing in a contractor to ensure that your systems are up and running, and then to cross train all of your long term core staff is a major benefit to using contractors. You can upskill your existing workforce. Contractors typically have exposure to many different environments, and they will be passing on what they have learnt from these experiences onto your full time staff. The flexibility, both temporary and contract. A lot of times, whether its through economic upturns or economic downturns, employers can be a little bit shy to hire permanent staff. The reason being, youre looking at a commitment to someones life, they likely would have left another role in order to take this one. If there is any potential instability coming down the pipe, you really don’t want to be in a position where you have to let this person go. So hiring a contractor and extending their contract can be a nice way to ease into that long-term decision. What are the key things people should consider before going into contracting? For all intents and purposes, contracting is running your own business. You’ll have to do your day-to-day work on top of regular admin tasks that you’ve probably never had to deal with in your permanent job. Whatever path you take there’s a lot of administrative work that you’re going to have to be thinking about. Not setting this up properly will just add additional stress to your life. Being organised upfront is critical, as contracting is supposed to give you the freedom to do other things. Youll need to make sure that you are an adaptable individual. Youll need to be adaptable to how that business actually does work and how the culture of that business works, leaving the impact on the stakeholders that you did a good job will be key to getting a reference for your next role. A lot of times you will be treated differently from a permanent employee and you need to be comfortable with this. You won’t always have the same benefits or vacation time as permanent employees and that can be tough to get over. Thinking of becoming an IT contractor? Ask yourself these  six questions before making the jump into IT contracting How can a contractor ensure that they have a steady and consistent flow of work in the pipeline? My best advice is to hire a recruiter. They will quietly shop your resume/CV to find your ideal industry and role while you are in your current role. So ideally,  your recruiter will have your next role linked up for you by the time you have finished your next assignment. Read more:  3 tips for finding your next IT contracting project What steps do you need to take to become a contractor? First step, make sure that there is a market for your skills. Check what the market is offering from a financial standpoint in a contract versus a permanent role. If you are entering a ‘client’s market’, meaning there are many more candidates available than there are jobs, getting into contracting can be very tough. Set up your own legal entity. This means that if you become successful and want to bring on a second employee or some administrative back up, your business has already been properly set up. What’s the best piece of careers advice that you’ve ever been given? When you enter an organisation, nobody will ever remember exactly what your accomplishments were, but they will all remember how you made them feel, and the impact you left on that organisation. So leaving that lasting impression on your colleagues that this person can be trusted, that this person was a pleasure to deal with and I would like to work with them again, is going to be critical for a contractors success in order to pick up that next assignment. If contracting is a career path that youre interested in, please be sure to check the procedures and laws in your local market first, as they may vary from country to country. Subscribe to the HaysWorldwide podcast Did you enjoy this podcast? 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