Is freelancing the end of conventional work?

The pandemic was the end of many conventions we had about modern work in a digital age. Those of us that use the internet for work purposes discovered that offices were not an essential part of the process, and employers saw that productivity does not go down when workers are doing their tasks remotely. Many tools came to the rescue of industrialized society, and task managing became a far more valuable part of business than checking how many hours employees spent at their posts.

But this begs the inevitable question… is freelancing the end of conventional work?

This may sound like a catastrophizing statement, but our recent experiences show that it may be true without being something bad for how we push forward professionally. Working via outsourced positions on remote parts of the planet has proven a cost-effective, efficient, and easy way to get the work done without having to sacrifice many of the elements of office culture that we thought would be inevitably lost if we made the change.

Freelancer working at his computer

Professionals in developing countries opt for freelancing jobs for many reasons. Maybe the currency in the country they reside in is weak and they hope to receive better wages through beneficial exchange rates. In the event of, say, a pandemic, freelancing can save many people that cannot have their livelihood depend on a conventional job.

In a highly competitive job market, many skilled professionals are left without access to jobs in their field. Freelancing offers an opportunity for them to excel in the things they love on a per-project basis. This allows them to use the full extent of their skill set on multiple projects at once. This pushes down the feeling of burnout when dealing with the same tasks every day on an inflexible schedule and encourages workers to seek out new skills that allow them to take on more diverse and challenging projects without lessening on quality.

Young people nowadays have problems finding jobs. The job market is bigger and harder than it ever was, and unrealistic requirements for entry-level positions have left many professionals desperate for work. This has pushed them to look for them in places that didn’t exist, say, 15 years ago. Adapting to this new environment has helped develop skills that just this demographic of workers can put forward, and freelancing has shown itself to be the best way to tackle the problem.

Freelancing at the forefront of inclusivity

It’s as easy as to ask yourself what all the young people you know are doing for a living. Chances are that if they are college graduates, they have resorted to freelancing at one point or another, and for positions like graphic designer, copywriter, or web developer, the most prevalent form of work they rely on is freelancing.

Freelancing helps connect businesses of all sizes with capable professional workers all over the world. Once you count on someone that speaks the same language as you and knows how to do their job, the last thing you’ll worry about is where they live.

Much is said and even more is to be done, about how minorities have a hard time integrating into the workforce. Even in our day and age, discrimination based on race, nationality, gender, and sexual identity is commonplace, because of the old guard of business management and their refusal to let go of their obsolete ways of looking at the world. This dangerous business philosophy not only extends to recruitment but also to how they think about their companies when approaching new projects.

Burnout is almost impossible to avoid when someone goes to work to perform the same tasks following the same methodology and not feeling any closure on any of the projects because of how management treats you as a worker and the value of what you do as replaceable and not special.

As if a great orchestra united through the power of sheet music and great direction, a company is, in the end, nothing more than a collection of professionals going forward to the same goal. Freelancing is nothing more than assembling a team of expert musicians. If everyone knows how to do their part, the music will be beautiful!

When you know you will be sitting at a desk for eight hours, you don’t have many incentives to do the job efficiently. Other than environments where tasks completed amount to an increase in remuneration, conventional working environments encourage everyone to take as much time as possible to complete their task, just to put off being assigned more work. On the other hand, freelance work allows people to get rewards as soon as they finish their part of a project, and gives them more freedom to plan around the periods they want to work in, and lets people be in any part of the world when performing their duties. This gives them freedom for their personal lives without sacrificing business time.

Being a remote worker has a lot of advantages, and being able to exploit them, both as a freelancer and as an employer will push you forward faster than you think. Is freelancing the death of traditional work? It may be, and if it is the case, good riddance!