Working as Freelancer or as employee. Pros and Cons!
Introduction:
In this article I’d like to share with you my though about these two differents status. What I will explain below is just my personal opinion which is based on my own experience in both status but it’s also based on the « French system » I would say since status could be or could work differently depending on the country you are working in.
Freelancer:
Basically working as a freelancer give you more freedom in many ways. You will work for differents companies and so a variety of projects.
You could be able to choose your working time shift (depending where and for who you’re working) as well.
If everything is working pretty well for your business, you will be able to choose if you want to work on this or that project.
It’s also more stressing since it’s difficult to know exactly if you will get some missions the month after or 6 month later…
To stay attractive to your potentials clients you need to produce news work some times to times that’s show you know the news technics or workflow or so. That’s mean you need to always be in a learning mind.
Employee:
As an employee you will get some security about money, you know exaclty how long you will be in the company (depending of your working contract) and that’s pretty good not only for yourself but for your banker too ^^
Another good point is that you will probably get new friends and in your field as a bonus (everybody knows how it can be frustrating to talk to your friends who didn’t get anything about what your saying).
You will also be able to work on bigger projects probably and be more involve on it. However this can be bad too since working on the same project for a very long time can be boring at the end.
The risk to be an employee for the same company for too long is that you will stay in your confortable state and maybe after a while you won’t get any motivation to look for others challenges. Maybe you won’t take the time to learn new things for example but what if you need to move in another city to follow your partner or what if the companie for who you’re working on as to file for bankruptcy as it unfortunately happen’s sometimes…? Well you will maybe be out of competition or just not that attractive.
Pros and Cons:
Freelancer
Pros:
- Choose your working time shift
- Choose for who you work
- Able to work remotely (if your client is okay with that)
- Working for a large variety of project
Employee
Pros:
- More financially secure
- Make good friends
- Work on the project from the begining to the end
- Once at home you’re not working anymore
Cons:
- If you don’t work you don’t get any money
- Need to manage time for quote and invoice
- Have to stay up to date (personally think that’s a good thing too)
- Harder to make new friends, I mean the type of friends that you will see regularly
Cons:
- Get boring if you do the same thing forever
- Stay in a confortable place and loosing the motivation to stay up to date
- Have to plan your holidays a while before
- Harder to quit a company even if you get a very good opportunity (just because you could think is too far or afraid that people aren’t nice there