Jack’s journey to becoming a Freelancer

The labor market has recently evolved, both in terms of the types of employment supplied by firms and in terms of the acquisition and development of employee potential. This is the so-called fourth industrial revolution, and the future of employment will look substantially different than it does now. This is due to the growing convergence of work and technology, as well as the physical and digital worlds.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

The First Changes

The creation of the internet in 1983 totally changed the world as we knew it. The first steps of futuristic companies started to show up. The first and the most important company based on the use of the internet was facebook. Facebook was the great idea of a single person and was one of the first steps into the new era and one of the first proofs of important changes in our society. But, what goes next?

In the past, people did not have full access to the internet, or any kind of simple technology, and at the same time they had to continue with the system of studying an important career and looking for work in big corporations. But, times have changed, now we all have access to the internet and we can do things that we could not do before, so why does society keep teaching us to go to school for a long time, study a career with rigid titles, work for big corporations and all this just to earn a fixed salary and be working more than 8 hours a day?

But a lot of people noticed that something was wrong. These people know that they can help people around the world and have an important job without having to work for a specific company. They are called Freelancers.

But this is all generic and descriptive. First, let’s start at the beginning — with a personal journey of a successful freelance writer, Jack. Let’s hear his story.

Freelancers

And if you are saying “I don’t even know what a freelancer is”, well, as of 1864 the term was already used to refer to independent workers and in 1882 specifically to those who carried out journalistic work. The prestigious ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ recognized and picked up the term ‘freelance’, as we know it today, in its 1903 edition.

The term “freelance” was commonly used to refer to those independent professionals who carry out written or graphic work, to later sell them to the media. Although today we can see that it is used to refer to almost any self-employed worker who is dedicated to carry out work activities for different companies. Freelancers do not work just for one company, they give their talent to a lot of companies who want to buy their services.

First Steps

I had no clue how to write a solid project proposal when I first started. I was accustomed to presenting my curriculum vitae (CV) with all of my qualifications, courses, languages, and so on. I was watching a lot of people on the internet saying that they need something in the area of writing, or in the area of marketing and I knew I could do those things easily but I didn’t even know what to tell them. I never knew that there were people who could work for many companies and at the same time not have to go to any company 10 hours a day to be scolded for this or that. The word “Freelancer” is not the most common word and people usually do not know what that is or the importance of these people, and maybe that is the reason why many clients today treat freelancers like “workers per hour”, and not a valued part of the team. When a freelancer provides his services to a person or a company, the freelancer is and always has to be as professional as an entire company. The Freelancer has to give a professional service and has to know what he can or cannot do, and what are the best prices that match with what he can do. These are the best things when talking about being ready to be a freelancer.

Growing as a Freelancer

When you start freelancing you do not know anything about selling your services or how to contact clients that could be interested in your job. There are a lot of things that you have to keep in mind when you want to sell your services like prices, delivery time, or the conversion funnel strategy (a very good tool for selling). And you would wonder, why are there no easy mechanisms for freelancers to get mentoring, coaching, and grow as a professional? When I was starting, nobody told me about these things and how to be a better freelancer, I had to fail and fail until I learned these things and I know that if I had started with a person who taught me everything I needed to know to be a successful freelancer, I would have paid whatever it took to have met that person. Being a freelancer and doing what I really love the most, without any type of schedule or fixed salary, was the best decision that I could make. I know that I could not have resisted the scolding of an angry boss :). That is why I took the freelancing career and I will never be working for a company as a worker in my life.

These days, if you know that you have a talent and you want to share it to people and sell them your services, society says that you will have to go to school anyway, because “If you do not have a degree, you do not know anything”, pure lies. If you know something and you have a big talent that you want to share, you can be a freelancer and you can create your own path. The time of wasting your time working for companies that only want to exploit you as a worker is over and the time that you can have control of everything has begun.

I want a day that, when asked about who he wants to become, a child should be able to say “I want to work as a freelancer”, and not be afraid to go for this career path. Grab your knowledge and become a freelancer, you do not have to care about what other people say about you, if you know that you have the talent and the will, you can do it!