Why IT professionals with good experience and expertise in domain do not freelance in India
Experienced IT Professionals! If you're an IT professional in any domain, means you're engaged or qualified with experience in a profession that requires special education, ability or training. All three are necessary requirements for an IT professional to tackle today’s computing world.
The demand for IT professionals in the India has risen 28 percent this year, compared to the year before according to the Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo). Globally, India ranks as the second largest freelance workforce after the US, according to Evans Data Corp, India had about 2.75 million software engineers in 2013. It was expected to grow to around 5.2 million by the year 2018.
We are in Q3 of 2019, it would not be too much if we assume number of software engineers in India should be somewhere between 5 to 6 million.
Such a huge workforce still freelance economy in India is struggling to find right candidates for the work. We tried to understand this issue. Here are our findings.
Lack of knowledge - Most of the college graduates are not aware of freelancing and its benefits. This subject is not openly discussed in campuses. Students are either completely unaware of freelancing or if they are aware, they do not see this as a career. Even the software engineers working in IT industries are not completely aware of freelancing and its benefits. In fact it is a taboo subject in Indian IT industry to talk about. People are afraid to talk about this as we observed and explained below. Must read Freelancing and its benefits.
Fear of getting fired - Indian IT companies at the time of hiring make employees sign a contract which abstain them from taking any other work while working with them. This sound weird as other professional are allowed to do private practice while doing a full time job. For example - Doctors, Lawyers and Chartered Accountant. However, software engineers in India are not allowed by IT companies to do the same. The working and experienced software engineers which are more productive are not supposed to freelance, creating the scarcity of productive and trusted resources in freelance market.
Lack of good freelancing platforms - There are a very less number of reputed freelancing platforms which welcome late joiners to freelancing. Upwork has already stopped accepting freelancers in various hot categories like web development and designing. If you are looking to just start your career in freelancing we would recommend toogit.com, guru.com and toptal.com.
Indians don’t want to pay any fee - Most of the Indians rely on free sources for finding freelancing jobs like Linkedin, Facebook. They do not want to pay commission to freelancing platforms. They forget that freelancing platforms charge a fee for the payment security. Jobs are genuine and are regularly scanned on freelancing platforms as opposed to free sources. Also, they provide payment protection for example Toogit.com guarantees you payment if you have completed and delivered the work as asked by client. But, if you are hired by a client through free sources, there is no payment protection.
Indian IT professionals are concerned that freelancing will take over his life - Freelancing is complicated not because of the project’s difficulty, but because of the time consumed in ‘getting’ the projects, to search a project that matches his skills as well as provide services to clients. It takes a lot of time and cause lots of stress. To avoid to search a project that matches a skills, then create a good proposal, fix project price, and make the proposal or bid on the project use Toogit’s Instant Connect (formerly known as automated proposal submission). Must read how to use automated proposal submission.
Time management - Freelancing is mostly concerning very precise tasks, timely requirements, and gradual processes. Furthermore, IT professional probably work on several projects at the same time as a freelancer, which means that multitasking is the obligatory necessity for the successful work. All this makes a lot of freelancers suspicious about their time management skills. Most of the us don’t make a clear schedule of duties and hours needed to solve or analyze the problems.
Experienced IT Professionals have the rich knowledge and experience that they have gained over the years. This is in demand in the freelance market because most clients prefer someone who has a fair idea about what’s needed and who can do their job efficiently. They also look for advice on various strategies and approaches that they can follow for the growth of their business.
Last Modified: May 15, 2020