Young IT contractor

[cannon999]

Cause he's got a degree and the world owes him a living.

What he said

[mbolton]

Hi All,

I am sort of in a similar situation to the original post on this. Thought I would save starting a new thread when my questions follow along a similar line.

I am another fairly young professional looking to get into the world of contracting. For what it matters I have about 4 years worth of experience, but have worked across multiple companies and roles covering small business right up to a FTSE top 10 company. Currently working in Telecoms in finance/billing.

I would like to eventually become a business analyst in a similar field but appreciate I may need to work up to this.

Happy to provide any and all information which would help you tailor advice. But my question is basically what I need to in the next year(?) in order to be in a situation to on quit permanent work and move into contracting

[NotAllThere]

Based in London, 3 years experience as an Infrastructure Engineer in various technologies and I'm 25

I was 26 when I went contracting. £200 a day. You were still in nappies then.

[Klodge]

I started working at 16 and it took me twenty years to be confident I could offer the skills needed of clients....and I've only had one say far (although they are very happy ).

As a permie my performance record was faultness in all my companies but as a contractor that means zero, it's all experience and with less than 5 years, I don't think you'd get many to bite unless you have a really unique skillset or a hard to gain clearance.....or your day rate is below market rate.

[fool]

Depends what you mean by "infrastructure engineer"?

If you mean you login to windows boxes and click GUIs or run random cli tools on a unix box then you've made a terrible mistake, because your skills largely aren't worth anything and you've jumped into a dying market that only still exist because terrlbile managers don't realise their staff and contractors are just clingers on.

If you deploy terraform from CI/CD or something analogous then you're probably underselling yourself at £250, assuming you have some understanding of what you're actually doing and you aren't just copying examples.

Assuming a reasonble level of skills, biggest worry is you might lack the ability to keep redefining yourself and the Charisma to land jobs that help you do that. If you can do that, you'll be fine.