Why I got in to contracting
I went contracting because I had very good technical skills and not great people skills so I didn't see me being able to shin up the corporate ladder quickly, and at the time I was on £32k and got offered a job paying £350 per day (This was more than 10 years ago).
I got out of contracting because I managed to shin up the ladder whilst contracting but my skillset is niche and it wasn't economical to try to maintain the position. Having got somewhere, I wasn't then satisfied doing lower level roles, and spent some time finding a permie role that I wanted to do whilst contracting.
Contracting's great when you first start and are making more than double your permie wage. However, making money is a bit like a drugs fix, you need more of it to get the same feeling of euphoria as you originally had. Over the years the gap between what you can make contracting and what you can as a permie narrows. You've given an example of being on £50k and being offered £500 per day and yet are met by a lot of skepticism by posters, whereas the relative difference was perfectly possible in the good old days.
The stresses of contracting have also greatly increased. When I started out, there was no IR35, no liability insurance, there were loads more jobs. To be fair to agents, they're generally better than they were in the late 90s when a large number of agents entered the industry with no clue as to the skills they were trying to place. Nowadays, I typically get rejected for not being an exact match of the skills/industry sector. In the late 90s you often got rejected because the agents were keyword scanning CVs.
One warning, a 1 year contract means that you're expected to work for the client for a year. The agreement isn't reciprocal, a client can chop you at any point. A year's contract is usually indicative that you'll be doing a contract that they can't find a permie for, however, which implies a certain amount of longevity. For your first contract, avoid taking one that's linked to a specific project, as you're likely to get chopped prematurely with those types of contracts (this also holds true for permie jobs offered by small/medium consultancies btw). Other things to think about is that you should check sites like jobstats to ensure that your skillset remains mainstream. Don't stick with a contract even if it's secure, well paid and close to home if you can see that your marketability is diminishing. Being a contractor is a half way house between being a paid employee and running your own business.
I went contracting because I had very good technical skills and not great people skills so I didn't see me being able to shin up the corporate ladder quickly, and at the time I was on £32k and got offered a job paying £350 per day (This was more than 10 years ago).
I got out of contracting because I managed to shin up the ladder whilst contracting but my skillset is niche and it wasn't economical to try to maintain the position. Having got somewhere, I wasn't then satisfied doing lower level roles, and spent some time finding a permie role that I wanted to do whilst contracting.
Contracting's great when you first start and are making more than double your permie wage. However, making money is a bit like a drugs fix, you need more of it to get the same feeling of euphoria as you originally had. Over the years the gap between what you can make contracting and what you can as a permie narrows. You've given an example of being on £50k and being offered £500 per day and yet are met by a lot of skepticism by posters, whereas the relative difference was perfectly possible in the good old days.
The stresses of contracting have also greatly increased. When I started out, there was no IR35, no liability insurance, there were loads more jobs. To be fair to agents, they're generally better than they were in the late 90s when a large number of agents entered the industry with no clue as to the skills they were trying to place. Nowadays, I typically get rejected for not being an exact match of the skills/industry sector. In the late 90s you often got rejected because the agents were keyword scanning CVs.
One warning, a 1 year contract means that you're expected to work for the client for a year. The agreement isn't reciprocal, a client can chop you at any point. A year's contract is usually indicative that you'll be doing a contract that they can't find a permie for, however, which implies a certain amount of longevity. For your first contract, avoid taking one that's linked to a specific project, as you're likely to get chopped prematurely with those types of contracts (this also holds true for permie jobs offered by small/medium consultancies btw). Other things to think about is that you should check sites like jobstats to ensure that your skillset remains mainstream. Don't stick with a contract even if it's secure, well paid and close to home if you can see that your marketability is diminishing. Being a contractor is a half way house between being a paid employee and running your own business.
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