Any tips & tricks on how to overlap a new contract on a lengthy notice period?

[rocktronAMP]

Imho unless you are in some niche market and / or getting regular emails / messages about relevant contracts, you'd be mad to be leaving a perm position now. There seems to be close to no contracts out there atm and perm positions are regularly getting 100+ applications within the first few hours, there also seems to be loads of dead job ads which are simply not going anywhere and are getting recycled constantly. The whole market seems to be moving to laying people off or hiring freezes, rather than creating new opportunities, so even if you land something, don't be surprised that the budget will be pulled and you'll be benched anyway.

Hold on to what you got. Contracting is very hard at the moment.

There might be employers out there who do have some extra dough to pinch another permanent manager, consultant or information scientist from another consultancy. Those with power are looking exactly for people with a very good track record. I saw one DevRel person managing to jump from ship to ship, usually those are not advertised positions. Those sort of opportunities are through networking, "i have seen this lady present well and I think she will great be client-facing to our new emerging leads"

[sreed]

Imho unless you are in some niche market and / or getting regular emails / messages about relevant contracts, you'd be mad to be leaving a perm position now. There seems to be close to no contracts out there atm and perm positions are regularly getting 100+ applications within the first few hours, there also seems to be loads of dead job ads which are simply not going anywhere and are getting recycled constantly. The whole market seems to be moving to laying people off or hiring freezes, rather than creating new opportunities, so even if you land something, don't be surprised that the budget will be pulled and you'll be benched anyway.

I think that’s a bit too black and white. What you’ve said might be true for some sectors/roles, and generally speaking the current situation might be worse than what it was in the past few years, but there are decently paid contracts out there. At the risk of sounding immodest, even as a generalist PM I am reasonably confident that I will be able to find a contract that pays decently if I were to lose the current one. Worst case, an FTC.

There will always be a need for flexible expertise, people who can come in, do a job and leave. The volume of such people needed will ebb and flow with the general business environment.