Career: Why You Shouldn’t Take Freelance Jobs

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Read this article before you make up your mind about taking up freelancing as a career. There are things I wrote here that I wish I knew 4 years ago!

Who is a freelancer?
According to Investopedia, A freelancer is an independent labourer who earns wages on a per-job or per-task basis, typically for short-term work. Benefits of freelancing include the freedom to work from home or from a non-traditional workspace, a flexible work schedule, and a better work-life balance.

Being a freelancer in 2022 is literally following the trend and companies are jumping on freelance jobs till they milk the joy out of it.

Advantages of Freelancers In Todays World
Flexibility and Special Expertise – Freelancer talent offers your business flexible access to special expertise at the proverbial drop of a hat.

Savings – Freelancers save lots of costs for themselves and also the company, including transport costs in terms of Freelancer & location costs amongst other numerous costs that physical jobs cost the company.

Fewer Responsibilities and Less Supervision – While many human resource departments don’t agree on this advantage for freelancers, it is impossible to miss. Study shows that freelancers are more productive in delivery, especially with less supervision. Freelancers help you and your colleagues avoid unnecessary headaches, too.

Independent contractors usually require a low level of supervision due to the fact they’re representing themselves.

They’ve likely performed hundreds or thousands of gigs previously, and know how to approach a project swiftly and intelligently with little hand-holding—after all, their livelihood depends on it.

High Quality of Work – For freelancers, know there’s no job security so they are really big on maintaining quality relationships and providing the best quality so they don’t get replaced by other freelancers & can easily be referred for more gigs. Doing their work right is a proper addition to their portfolio and they don’t joke with it.

Worldwide Reach – When you employ new in-house staff, you’re pulling from a finite pool. Future staff must either already live in your immediate region or be willing to relocate on short notice.

Conversely, if you decide to look for a remote resource, freelancers aren’t in-house and thus don’t need to hail from or relocate to a certain area. This offers your company or business a worldwide reach when choosing talent for tasks.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, by “that” I mean the perks of being a freelancer, I’m going to list why taking freelancing as a career is most likely a bad idea.

Why you shouldn’t take freelance Jobs

Cons of freelancing
Feeling isolated – There’s no fun in working alone, even when you make all the money you ever need, back in junior secondary school, our biology teachers always insisted that humans are social animals, personally as a freelancer, I often feel isolated when I work, doesn’t mean other things don’t motivate me to get the work done, but I think a work environment where a few other humans are present isn’t such a horrible idea, so if you are preparing to take up freelancing as a career, be ready to feel isolated.

Hustling 24/7 for new gigs – Job security is a really big issue for freelancers like myself, while as you grow older in your niche/expertise, you become confident in the results you can give to your clients.

Does that mean you won’t be on websites like Freelancer, Fiverr and Upwork searching for new and better clients? No! Applying for jobs on these sites will definitely be part of your daily routine.

Inconsistent work and cash flow: Freelance jobs are plagued with this as a horrible factor, many companies and brands have adopted a bad practice of owing their freelancers after they’ve delivered on the jobs, personally it appears that freelancing doesn’t provide a sense of Job security & consistent pay from the employer to the employee.

Instead of having one boss, you have several clients to answer to: One boss can be bad enough, but now having multiple clients as bosses can be a horrible state to work in. As a freelancer, it takes me 2-3 months to have a level of understanding about a client and their temperaments, while it can be a tough 2 – 3 months because you’ll get queries, and threats to cut or even cut contracts, but eventually, when you and the client have been able to meet at the middle, the work can come across easy.

But remember you are searching for new clients regularly, which means you have no break from trying to understand what exactly the client wants even when they vaguely filled out the questionnaire you provided at the beginning of the Job.

No paid time off, no maternity/paternity leave – Forget the lies they tell you about you having your own time and all that, it’s a big lie.

You take a break, you get replaced in the freelance world, even if it’s a temporary replacement the job must go on. Also unlike other employments (full time) where you get maternity/paternity leave, it is not also so for freelance jobs. But this isn’t so every time, some companies have policies that protect their freelance employees by giving them physical employee benefits even when they are far away.

Thanks for reading this article, at the moment I’m a freelance Social media manager & Digital marketer, and I hope this short piece actually helps your decision in getting into the freelance world.

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