The Maturing Market of Freelance Work

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Over the last few years, the way that a lot of people work has started to change. Instead of spending their days in an office or other workplace, huge portions of the world’s population have started working from home. Technically being self-employed, being a freelancer gives people the freedom to choose when and where they work, along with the type of work which they do, all while making it much cheaper for the people hiring them. Of course, though, like any market, this type of work has a long way to go before it matures, and this post is going to be exploring what needs to be done.

Standardisation: As more and more people start to follow this path, it is becoming harder for companies to understand their role in all of this. Each freelancer will expect something different, especially if they have worked for someone else like this, and this can create challenges when it comes to treating everyone fairly. To solve an issue like this, standardisation needs to be applied to the market on the whole. Not only could this make the process of getting a job like this much easier, but it could also help freelancers to do their work more effectively.

Ease: Of course, though, making things easy for employers isn’t the only side of this. Instead, if this industry is going to go much further, things need to get easier for the people doing the work. Freelancers tend to be very busy, as they will have to do more work than normal employees to make the same amount of money. At the moment, just about the only tool to help with the administration side of this work is a contractor umbrella company. This sort of system takes all of the invoicing and taxation work out of the hands of a freelancer, making their work feel much more like a normal job, but this still has a long way to go until it’s perfect. 

Security: Finally, as the last area to consider, living with a job which doesn’t feel secure can be a nightmare. From one day to the next, you could feel as though your job will disappear, and this will make things very stressful. Currently, unless a freelancer has a special contract in place, there is nothing stopping their employer from simply cutting them out, leaving them to find new work. There isn’t a good enough solution to this sort of problem, yet. Instead, if you want to work in this industry, it will be worth having some savings in place, as you may need them to cover time when you’re out of work.

With all of this in mind, it should be much easier to see where the world of freelance work still needs to improve before it can be considered mature. Working like this can be both a pain and a joy, and it usually depends on the work you’re doing to handle it. To make this easier for you, it could be worth doing some more research to figure out which parts of this you can push even further.