Jacques Mattheij

Technology, Coding and Business

Skills

Plenty of skills lend themselves to an independent or freelance work method. Whether yours is one of those is of course the big question, but in general the skills required should be reasonably hard to come by, should allow you to create a relationship with your customers that is repetitive in nature, and should have a remuneration high enough to justify the overhead of running a small company.

Though it is technically possible to do just about any job as a freelancer being an assembly line worker or something like that is not normally done. There are many reasons for this, social conventions and others. The general rule seems to be that if there are lots of other people doing it then probably you can do it too, and if nobody else is doing it then there is no point in pursuing it unless you are genuinely out to change the way that segment of the market operates.

Good candidate skills for freelancing are:

  • creative
  • managerial
  • engineering
  • contracting
  • and many many others

This book was written by a computer programmer, and computer programming is something that you can easily do as a freelancer, but there is no reason why you could not apply all of this to project management, being an artist that works on commission basis or a freelance photographer and almost any other profession that you can come up with.

Also, no matter how good you (think you) are today, the world around you is moving, and it is very easy to just stick to what you know once you’ve found something that works. This is not wise because one day you will find that your marketable skills of yesterday are either no longer marketable or are now so commonplace that your hourly rates will drop through the floor.

It is wise to invest at least a portion of your time on keeping your finger on the pulse of the field that you are operating in, to read trade journals and websites and to hone your skills.