The Impact of Freelancing in Developing Countries

How the concept of online freelancing has managed to change the job sphere in countries.

Many developed countries successfully use platforms, such as Upwork and Fiverr to find skilled personalities to get tasks done. It allows skills and needs to meet under one banner online and irrespective of the geographic boundary of the skill requesters and suppliers as well. For example, Sri Lankan IT companies have long used such platforms to find overseas clients who are in search of cost-effective IT skills of the subcontinent.

Such popular online freelancing platforms allow Sri Lankans to seek skills for a broader range of categories such as home maintenance, etc, thus broadening up the usage of Upwork and Fiverr’s IT-centric concepts.

Online task outsourcing became popular mainly due to its ease of use; access to an excessive number of skilled resources and the relatively cheaper cost of the skills.

Online task externalizing and freelancing Overview

Online task externalizing became popular mainly due to its ease of use; access to an excessive number of skilled resources and because of the relatively cheaper costs. Companies from around the world used temporary staffing channels such as agencies to hire temporary staff for specific short term assignments and immediate projects. In the beginning, the hired temporary staff were to fill in for permanent employees in circumstances where they couldn’t fulfill it. But nowadays, this practice is used so that the company can maintain a flexible workforce that can grow and shrink as demanded. This was the popular practice until the early 2000s.

However, with the ultimate resurgence of the internet and the ever so evolving platform economy, firms are bending towards the plethora of advantages they gain by complementing their flexible staffing practices with the efficient opportunity to source work through online freelancing platforms. These handy platforms enable all spheres of humans that engage in businesses, and as well as for other businesses to conveniently find a variety of online freelancer specialists when the time for the need comes. Thus, questions such as the true value of expanding the usage of freelance platforms, what online platform sourcing offer and how to begin freelancing that surrounds the topic of freelancing platforms must be answered.

According to a study, it was concluded that flexibility offered by these online platforms exceeded the conventional agency based sourcing resources thus freelancing becoming the more popular option as well as the more efficient one.

Advantages of platform sourcing explored — How to start freelancing

One of the biggest benefits of internet-based job platforms would be the ability rendered for direct clients to connect directly and build a network with the freelancer. According to a study, it was concluded that flexibility offered by these online platforms exceeded the conventional agency based sourcing resources, thus, freelancing becoming the more popular option as well as the more efficient one over time rapidly. The rapid development and the popularization of freelancing platforms such as Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer and Onawadak.lk, especially in Sri Lanka was a direct cause of freelancing itself having a lot of different dimensions, such as expanding the opportunities for job seekers besides being cost-effective. But, the main issue was that people hardly know about how to start freelancing let alone the existence of freelancing itself.

The reason freelancing platforms have become an attractive sourcing solution to many

According to a Harvard business review article, the main reasons for online freelancing platforms to become an attractive sourcing solution was because they had:

• Significantly low start-up and transaction costs.
• Provide corporate level companies on-demand access to knowledge, skills, and expertise of a global pool of potential skilled workers.
• Offers convenient technology-based solutions to govern and manage projects with a wide selection of external workers.

What are the main highlight values of online freelancing platforms?

Cost and Quality

Some companies and people who seek for freelancers are pressed for a tight budget, therefore, budgetary constraints are a foregoing determining factor in deciding whether to source work through a platform or to go to a place physically, where the service they seek can be hired costing time and money.

In addition, online platforms provide evidence of their platform users or the freelancers’ digital design services, portfolios, etc, thus the high quality of the work that will be delivered by the freelancers can be guaranteed, therefore, worth the money spent. In other situations, the costs would deem the same as that of a physical channel the service could be done but the later, the freelancer with the same costs would promise a higher quality output.

Speed, Expertise and Flexibility

It is a fact that contacting skilled freelancers through an online freelancing platform is more efficient than other methods of recruiting skilled workers for temporary jobs.

Imagine sending emails to skill agencies or calling hundreds of recruitment places to find the right person to do that one job. In contrast to the time wasted on phone calls, meetings, presentations and briefs that are needed to get a project started with an external worker, simply browsing for a freelancer that fits your required skillset through a platform such as Onawadak or freelancer is extremely simple and stupendously fast. Where it would’ve taken weeks could be done within two to four days on average. It is also reported that access to expert level workers for certain temp jobs can be efficiently found through freelance platforms as they have a wide globalized network of skilled workers interconnected through the cloud, etc. This access allows enterprises or households seeking skills and expertise that they expect to be received as expected.

Another very important dimension of freelancing platforms is flexibility. The greater the flexibility offered by platforms, the greater the impact on how easily the workforce employed could be scaled up and down, allowing the teams or the hired workers to be extremely agile with resources.

Conclusion

It is imperative that we must spread more awareness in third world countries, such as Sri Lanka on using freelancing platforms to find jobs and to get jobs done, so the skilled youths in the country are not forgotten and left out. The efficiency of using a local platform such as the Onawadak app or a popular competitive platform like Fiverr or Truelancer is worth the while and would help in the upbringing of the country and most importantly because it would help bring revenue from outside countries into the country as well.

It should be one of the foregoing missions to spread knowledge on freelancing as it will be a major turning point for such countries. The increased usage of freelance platforms would be a true solution to the job drought that raises its ugly head during every time a batch of fresh graduates comes out of a university year after year in Sri Lanka.

We need to acknowledge the prevailing nature of the job market in such countries, thus provide guidance and spread awareness of using freelance platforms. In addition, if anyone is looking for more information on “how to start freelancing”, perusing freelancing blogs for a start is highly recommended.