In today’s economy, a number of people for one reason or another turning to freelancing. For some, it may be a case getting sick and tired of a traditional 9 to 5 job that they find absolutely boring and decide to pursue a passion. For others, they may be getting into the freelance economy as a necessity in order to make ends meet. That said, some might be doing freelance work in full-time capacity on a project to project basis and others may be moonlighting and carry out freelance work on the side.
Whatever the case may be, one thing that is clear is that freelancing is on the rise. Freelancing is appealing for a number of reasons which include; Income, about 3/4 of freelancers reported making the same amount or more money than they did in their traditional jobs; Flexibility & work-life balance, having the choice of when and where to work and lastly, Freedom, deciding who to work for and what to work on. Who wouldn’t want that?
As a freelancer, one key to success is staying relevant because something that you may have mastered a couple of years ago and haven’t brushed up on may not be so relevant today. One way of keeping up to date or upskilling is continued learning and getting the skills that you need isn’t that hard in this day in age. Online learning is all the rage at the moment as you can enrol for courses both free and paid that you complete in your own time. You are bound to find a course that you are interested in taking on online learning marketplaces such as Udemy which has over 40,000 courses and 11 million students.
As far a using and brushing up on your current skills, freelancers can also look at what other skills are in demand and look to see if diversification (therefore more income) is an option. Upwork recently released a report on the 20 fastest growing freelance skills in the U.S.
The fastest growing freelance skills:
- User experience design
- ASP development
- Shopify development
- English proofreading
- SEO writing
- Animation
- Virtual assistant
- Lead generation
- Data mining
- Video editing
- WordPress development
- AngularJS development
- Java development
- Accounting
- Android development
- iOS development
- Zendesk
- MongoDB
- Data visualization
- AutoCAD
Image courtesy of Upwork
According to Upwork’s report, half of the top 20 skills have to do with web development and they have seen a 125 percent year on year growth. They also noted a rapid rise in content marketing skills such as SEO writing, proofreading and video editing as companies look to meet business objectives with high quality content.
Will this market demand information at hand, its time for you to take stock of your skills and see if you can use them to get more out of the freelance economy and if need be, brush up on your skills or diversify by learning something new at your pace via an online learning marketplace such as Udemy.
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