Higher earnings and flexible hours.
78 percent states that money is a main factor when choosing life as a B2B freelancer according to a new study from No Fluff jobs.
Recently a new study from No Fluff Jobs, in cooperation with Ework, digs in to the life as an IT-freelancer.
How do they get their gigs, how much money do they earn, what benefits do they obtain and how satisfied are they in general with the worklife they have chosen?
Remote work and the Future of Work
The last couple of years we have seen a huge change in the labor market in Europe, and in the world. Life as a freelancer has become available for people in a lot of different areas of expertise and is no longer a lifestyle restricted to people in the creative business. According to statistics from the European Commission, 28 million people in the EU works as a freelancer that finds assignments via a digital platform. In the US a staggering 39 percent of all workers are freelancers, according to Upworks report Freelance Forward 2022. IT is one area where there has been a large increase in freelancers and many of them choose to work remote. A phenomena that has spread even more, in all professions, after the pandemic.
Flexibility is one of the main reasons for choosing to work as a freelancer. In the survey from No Fluff Jobs over 78 percent said they chose the lifestyle for the chance to earn more money. 54 percent for the flexible hours and 46 percent for the flexibility to work where ever they want (multichoice question).
Given these answers its not surprising that over 70 percent of the asked freelancers worked remotely.
How do they find their contracts?
More and more people choose the life as a freelancer but how do they get their contracts. According to the No Fluff Study many of them don’t have to search that long, they are actually headhunted for most positions, especially in Poland and Central Europe. A staggering 60 percent of them. Recommendations from friends, Linkedin, jobboards and digital platforms for freelancers were other common ways of obtaining contracts.
Earnings and benefits
So are the freelancers earning more than they would if they were employed? The answer is that many of them probably are. 28 percent said that their income was over 5000 Euro net and 25 percent has an income between 4001-5000 Euro.
Malgoratza Migdal, Head of Ework’s Remote Sourcing Center, states that the contractor rates offered through Ework are up to 20 percent higher than those provided on an employment.
When it comes to benefits the most frequent one offered to freelancers is flexible working hours, it is also the one most important to freelancers. Other benefits consists of paid holiday, free working trips and equipment.
How about challenges?
So did the freelancers struggle with any challenges during 2022. The past year was a hard one, not only for freelancers, the war in Ukraine, rising inflation and the after math of a pandemic hit us all. However one third of the freelancers stated that they had struggles with major challenges during the year. 23 percent struggled with the global changes in the economic situation and 25 percent struggled with dealing with stress. More surprising was that one fifth of the respondents struggled with drop in self-motivation.
Read the study here!
About the study:
The study, What does the work of IT freelancers look like?, was conducted in the period between 17.10-2022 – 1.12.2022
The study had 371 respondents, the research was anonymous and was sent to IT specialist whose tax residency is a country located in Europe. The majority of the respondents were from Poland but included freelancers from Hungary, Sweden as well as other countries in Europe.
No Fluff Jobs:
No Fluff Jobs is an job portal for it recruitment. The portal is the only portal that requires the employer to post a salery bracket in every advertisement. No Fluff Jobs operates in Poland, Hungary, Czech, Slovakia and Ukraine.
