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Popular Misperceptions about Contracting
Many technical communicators today yearn to 'go contract'. Here are a few reasons to reconsider that goal:
- Perception: I'll earn more.
Reality: Some contractors are in constant demand (usually because of their outstanding technical skills), and earn substantially more than they could on staff, but most net less than they would in a comparable salaried position because they can't bill as many hours as they anticipate, have to provide their own benefits, vacation/holiday pay, training, and tools of the trade, as well as pay higher taxes. Their financial situations become substantially more complex and confusing. Most contractors actually work harder, worry more, and keep less.
- Perception: I'll have more control of my time.
Reality: If clients could plan better, they wouldn't need contractors. Contractors must therefore routinely decide whose schedule (theirs or their clients') is more important, and resolve the conflict between whether to sacrifice a promising business relationship or their own leisure time. In our experience, it is a very rare contractor who can confidently decline a project without having something better on offer. Is that control of one's time, or simple fear-based pragmatism?
- Perception: I'll get more variety.
Reality: Contractors, much more than staff employees, are hired because of what they know and can prove that they've done. Clients won't pay contractors to learn their technology or train them on how to meet their audience's needs. Hiring managers often tell us that they'd prefer to assign their fun, leading-edge projects to in-house, staff employees — and hire contractors for emergencies and maintenance-mode work. Moreover, we see many contractors being pigeon-holed because they've not taken the initiative to expand their skills, perhaps because they're too busy working or trying to find work. By contrast, staff employees routinely receive training that helps them develop new and marketable skills, and the expense of the instruction as well as the missed work time is borne by the employer. Most forward-looking employees avail themselves of this benefit frequently.
- Perception: I won't have to commute as much.
Reality: As a contractor, you're no less accountable for the timely completion of accurate, high-quality deliverables, and if creating them requires facetime with engineers or hands-on use of the product that only runs on a sophisticated network or behind an impregnable firewall, you must still visit the client's site. Clients routinely tell us that they've been ‘burned' by offsite contractors who overbilled, lied about their progress, produced sub-par work, or were ineffective at gathering information from busy SMEs. As a result, many clients refuse to hire contractors who insist on working mostly offsite, saying that compensating for a remote worker's absence creates more problems than it solves. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of staff opportunities we handle allow — in fact, encourage — technical communicators to work offsite at least one (1) and sometimes as many as four (4) days a week.
Most contractors never consistently achieve the rewards that motivated them to go solo. Their goals of increased income, independence, variety, and telecommuting elude them for the reasons mentioned above as well as in our companion article on offsite contracting. This is not to say that you shouldn't try contracting or that staff jobs are a panacea for all the problems of modern life. As one technical communications manager we know characterized the choice between contracting and captivity (staff employment), "on one hand you have the illusion of prosperity, on the other the illusion of stability."
What's the Solution?
Is there a way to get what you want without unnecessary risk? We think the answer for most is 'yes' — and we call it 'the right staff job'.
Most of the companies we represent offer their staff employees the following advantages over those available to contractors:
- far more financial security
- much better economic and lifestyle benefits
- more variety
- increased support for mastering the subject material and producing high-quality work
- plentiful opportunities to develop new skills and pursue related interests
- a greater sense of mission and teamwork
- comparable personal autonomy
Our clients' hiring managers recognize that the best candidates have priorities other than their careers, and try hard to integrate their team's personal values with the company's goals. After all, hiring is time-consuming and thankless work, recruiters aren't cheap, and companies these days have a strong economic incentive to build and retain reliable teams.
Essentially, if synergy is what you seek from your technical communications career, we believe you're much more likely to find it as a staff employee than as a contractor.
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