2023 will see increased redundancies, with fewer new jobs, leading to a global growth in freelancing
As someone who has been a fulltime freelancer since 1978, Roy Sheppard has worked through two global recessions. He says “Because of increased competition, for existing freelancers, the predicted European and US recession will make their lives even more challenging and insecure than usual. For the many who get forced into freelancing, it will be worse.”
Due to financial pressures, businesses will need to make savings, cutting budgets to the bone. All non-essential expenditure will be put on hold and in many cases, some business owners will stop using freelancers altogether.
If companies continue to lose money, they will look to make non-essential employees redundant, as has been seen recently with Twitter and Meta. It’s highly likely that a recession will lead to huge layoffs globally in hundreds of thousands of organisations. Get redundancy advice for business owners in the UK from Avensure.
People with transferrable skills are likely to choose freelancing because they have no other option, so a massive increase in competition is expected by people who’ll be prepared to work at rock bottom prices.
Roy Sheppard says that freelancers don’t have a safety net at the best of times, so it’s essential that workers do whatever they can now, before the downturn takes a grip. If you are a freelancer, he has several recommendations that will make a significant, positive difference in the next couple of years.
Firstly, you have to ask yourself whether your service is a ‘must-have’ or a ‘nice-to-have’ and if your role is non-essential, you will be vulnerable. If you are at risk, you need to do an audit of your skills and sharpen up how you present them, so it sounds more ‘must-have’.
It might be worth investing time to learn new skills and register with online channels to sell your new digital expertise, so you can earn as you learn.
Cost reduction, especially before you are forced to do it, is a secret weapon. You need to go through your bank account statement and identify every regular non-essential payment and stop spending on those items, especially seemingly inexpensive things like daily cappuccinos.
When the economy eventually picks up again, you may think you’ve survived but make sure enough money is set aside to pay all of your tax liabilities, always remembering that the money that goes into your bank account does not all belong to you.
It’s also important to develop useful networks with other freelancers. When you have trusted connections, you can feed work to others and they can reciprocate. If you would like additional support and to join such a community of high-calibre freelancers, check out the new platform, freelancersupport.online.
