Contracting straight out of uni. Is it doable?

[vwdan]

Welcome to the world of degree-laden IT people. Yours is just the latest year to receive that special piece of paper.

Get a permie job, climb as high as you can, as quickly as you can, most importantly with all your training and learning paid for by someone else. Why settle for a £200/day code monkey job now when you could command £500/day as an SME in ten years?

PurpleGorilla will be along shortly to discuss the Entitled Generation.

Ding Ding - THIS is the answer, and the figures are pretty spot on too (Or at least based on the last ten years).

Being slightly more constructive, I still think one of the most difficult things about contracting is advancement in seniority. Keeping skills up to date is one thing, but moving from "Junior Widget Maker" through to "Senior Widget Maker" and then onto "Widget Making Consultant" or whatever is going to be a lot lot tougher as a contractor. You'll land that senior role one day but then there'll be no jobs so you take a job back as "Junior Widget Maker" and then spend hours persuading people that you really can be a senior again. There's a LOT of contractors out there still doing the same job they were doing ten years ago - fair enough if they're happy, but I couldn't do it.

Far easier to work your way up in a more structured environment and make the leap straight into consultant territory. Lots more options, and even if you do have to take a more junior role you'll have enough backup on your CV that it won't really matter.

[pr1]

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Come on, own up your clever little Oxbridge chunt, who wrote this? It's like trying to work your way through a maze!

HTH

[BoredBloke]

I did it - left uni and went straight into contracting. I've never had a proper job!

I used to work for Shell throughout my summer holidays and managed to build up a years worth of work with them. That was enough to get the agencies interested. But you have to be prepared to do the really crap jobs for crap money. In my first 3 years I moved from Aberdeen to Swindon, Bournemouth, Nottingham, Tunbridge wells and Leeds.

[DimPrawn]

HTH

That's why you are the successful contractor you are.

[piotrkula]

It is much better to go into a perm job and really learn what programmin is about. At your first job you will be spending TONS of time on stackoverflow working out how to make that damn jQuery bind to that stupid server thing......as a contractor that is unacceptable, you need to know what to do and how you going to do it on the spot.

But, i have seen freshling contractor roles before... very rare but I suppose they want to grab people like you and convert them back to permies.

I did 3 years as permie in 3 different companies. I started at 13.5k per year learnt a ton of stuff (and self funded Microsoft certifications and spend all my free time learning new things and testing stuff) and how not to write software and got a better idea of how to do things properly.

Next job was 18k and I started to have much more of a say because I knew more or less how to opiniate myself in terms of software developing and provide somewhat good advice... worked that gig did more certifications, more self learning, a few side projects.

Next job got well in to 25k, I cam in there teaching the old dev MVC and Azure. I blew them away, got bored of office politics and how difficult people were being to learn simple things.

Started contracting, 30k+ (you know the drill) - Now I deal with even more office polices and politics than ever before. I am not a people person and contracting was supposed to steer me away from that... noooot! good money and if you find good clients you can ride a sweet gig for 12-24 months, do other work in between and chill and now I can collect big names on my CV, like NHS, SKY, etc

Take the time to appreciate the perm side, learn more and gain commercial experience, start wherever they will take a freshling.

[MrMarkyMark]

I blew them away

I hope you charged extra for that

[jmo21]

.....as a contractor that is unacceptable

...but still pretty easy to get away with

[MrMarkyMark]

...but still pretty easy to get away with

Plenty of bleedin' useless ones at Client Co, I can't believe half of them have ever worked on system development projects

[PurpleGorilla]

PurpleGorilla will be along shortly to discuss the Entitled Generation.

I can't talk about IT, but in my area of engineering, a degree is essential. You have to do the hard yards, no short cuts.

Contracting tends to be for people with a minimum of 10 years experience.

Some post grad qualifications are also useful, as well as lots of post nominals. You can charge extra for those.

But engineering contracts tend not to pay as high as IT (from what I can tell).

[SueEllen]

I can't talk about IT, but in my area of engineering, a degree is essential. You have to do the hard yards, no short cuts.

Contracting tends to be for people with a minimum of 10 years experience.

Some post grad qualifications are also useful, as well as lots of post nominals. You can charge extra for those.

But engineering contracts tend not to pay as high as IT (from what I can tell).

The engineers I know got and get better rates as contractors as engineers.

The ones who are on the best rates are in IT though...