The freelancer life is a hard one. If you’re lucky, you lock down a couple of solid clients who pay reliably; but even the most experienced freelancer will inevitably find work drying up for (hopefully short) periods.
A recent (pre-COVID) study by UpWork, which surveyed more than 6,000 freelancers in the U.S., emphasizes what workers already know: Freelancing has become a long-term career choice for many. “Skilled services” such as programming, consulting, and IT made up 45 percent of freelancers.
Some 77 percent of UpWork’s respondents said that technology had made it easier for them to find work. But knowing how to write code or hunt down a bug wasn’t the only valued skill among freelancers: Some 78 percent of them said that “soft skills are at least equally as important as technical skills to succeed in their work.” (That seems like something that wouldn’t change, whether or not there’s a viral pandemic shifting the very nature of work.)
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