Im permanently employed as a web design and Im considering switching to contracting. My contract requires me to give my employer a months notice.
Ideally Id like to have my first contract job lined up before I hand in my notice but im assuming no one who needs a contracter will be prepared to wait 4 weeks? Has anyone else been in this situation?
This would be my first time contracting so I dont have many contacts. This is why im a bit worried about quitting my job if I dont have anything else lined up.
Thanks
I don’t understand, are you not allowed to work on other projects while under contract with your current employer? Unless the contract you are talking about is to build something huge and notable, I wouldn’t quit your day job just yet. You said you don’t have many contacts and this is your first contract job. Are you really going to quit a steady income without having a solid customer base?
Ideally, you will want to build up your base of customers and know that you will have work coming in for the foreseeable future before you quit your job.
Im not talking about taking on freelance projects, I mean being employed by a company but on a contact basis rather than as a permanent employee. I would find a contract role through a recruitment company or by applying through job listing sites.
[FONT=verdana]I’m afraid this is part of the price you pay for being a contractor. There are many benefits to being a contractor, as I’m sure you know. But, in return, you have to live with the problem of not being able to look for work until you are ready and available to take it on.
This isn’t just to do with switching from salaried employment to your first contracting job. You’ll find the same things happens at the end of every contract. You won’t be able to look for new work while you’re still working on the current contract, because the new client will probably not be prepared to wait (well, some of them might, but probably not for more than a week or two at most). And once you do start looking for new work, you’ll need to find it quickly otherwise you’ll be without any income.
This is one of the reasons I have never done contract work myself. But I have several friends who are contractors, and they all mention the same problem. On the other hand, they all enjoy contract work, and would probably not want to go back to salaried employment.
That’s because when you have a certain reputation and a number of customers, finding a new job is more or less easy and therefore the cash flow is regular. Not always the case but most of the time it works that way.