Self-employment in IT?

jaydeeuk1

Have a checkout of this place...

http://www.rentacoder.com/RentACoder/DotNet/default.aspx

I've done a couple of jobs there when trying to decide what to do for myself in spare time (before mb'ing days!).
Alternatively, if you're already good with excel, there is always a demand from betfair users looking for people to develop using the API in excel. Thought that might interest you!

buglawton

I have used Rentacoder to get coding done. Nowadays it is so full of scamsters who know how to manipulate the feedback system that service purchasers like me are very put off. Rentacoder seems happy with the situation and plans no changes.

Plus you will have to compete with half of India.

isofa

Excel skills are very much in demand in the banking sector, especially interface and VBA customisation...

I've written entire applications in Excel, for finance companies, statistical research, and many moons ago even a complex database as a proof of concept!

I'd personally not be considering the cheap as chips on-line marketplace like rentacoder, I'd be looking at local small businesses up to large corporates, but then I charge a hefty day rate!

I've been working freelance, creating bespoke systems (mainly database) since 1996, whilst also using my photography skills in other areas.

U4EA_2

Hello again folks!

Sorry if I am a bit late back to this thread but I have been busy with other things - one of them learning VB.

My professional background was in database work for the financial sector.

One of the reasons I was interested in learning Excel with the idea of freelancing was the results one of my mates Dads had. About 5-6 years ago, he found himself redundant, having previously worked in office management and had used Excel extensively. He was very resourceful and as soon as he was made unemployed, he got a comprehensive book on MS Excel out and studied it night and day until he knew it all. He then went around local businesses in his town and offered to create spreadsheet databases etc for their work or any other little things he could for them using his Excel skills and charged £17 per hour. Almost immediately, he had more than enough work, and cut it off at 20 hours per week (he was nearing retirement and his living expenses were very cheap anyway).

While I do not want to sound like I am dismissing the wisdom of the more experienced people here, I have always been of the belief that hard work/dedication/belief massively increases probability of success. Learning coding and all of Excel is something I intend on doing anyway - I am looking forward to the challenge. With this in mind, I might see if I can get a bit of work here and there at the end of it. Nothing wrong with trying.

Thanks again for all the input and if anybody has anything else to add, please do.

Cheers guys!

buglawton

It is still possible these days to migrate across the skill spectrum and take up new gainful employments - but not if from the outset you state you want to be self employed (and implicitly, may not be willing to commute to a far away office every day of the week like most folks do).

Additionally there's quite a strong temping market in IT for support work - however there's less scope for retraining on the job.

Do an accurate self-assessment of your skills then target the market - but you have to fall in the terms of the one who pays.

PlutoinCapricorn

It seems to me that you enjoy learning things for their own sake and that you really want to be a 'portfolio worker'. You are also not quite sure which direction to go in. If you really like EXCEL then why not go into it as far as you want to, but if you are learning something in the hope of getting freelance work using it then do check out the demand and the competition before committing yourself.

Working as a freelancer often means having the right things on your CV if you are marketing yourself to agencies and possible clients. Another approach is when you have a lot of contacts who know and trust you. You can spot gaps in their systems and write proposals offering to do the work.

U4EA_2

One of the reasons I wanted to get into this in the first place is that I worked for a major financial organisation and I was amazed/appalled at how bad their database and CRM was as a result.

At the time when the recession hit and people were starting to lose thier jobs, I started to wonder if it would be a good idea to contact companies and see if I could offer anything that might improve their business by automating things through macros etc.

What I really want to do is look at their IT/data systems and data manipulation and see if I can significantly improve their processes (re-engineering processes was a speciality of mine) so their work is quicker, easier to do and more accurate.

It might sound a bit strange bit I am very analytical and I am very good at spotting bottlenecks/weak links in the chain, isolating them and changing them - and that can huge for the overall health of an organisation. I also HATE needless clutter, decentralisation, wasted resourced etc and I am very good at reducing this. However, it would seem rather strange to approach a company with just this idea.

U4EA_2

PlutoinCapricorn wrote: »

It seems to me that you enjoy learning things for their own sake and that you really want to be a 'portfolio worker'. You are also not quite sure which direction to go in. If you really like EXCEL then why not go into it as far as you want to, but if you are learning something in the hope of getting freelance work using it then do check out the demand and the competition before committing yourself.

Working as a freelancer often means having the right things on your CV if you are marketing yourself to agencies and possible clients. Another approach is when you have a lot of contacts who know and trust you. You can spot gaps in their systems and write proposals offering to do the work.

Thanks dude.

I posted that last reply before I read this - and what you say is more like what I am thinking.

In the last two positions I have held, the scope for improvement of process just using Excel macros for data manipulation was massive. At one point a few years ago I was working on a team of 8 people, quality checking data on a huge database. The thing is that we would pull all this info out of the database and then we would visually scan it for info errors etc and - had someone written quality macros - you could have got rid of at least half of the team members as so much of the work could have been automated. Rather than visually scanning one sheet and comparing it to another over hours to look for duplicate data etc then manually copying things across, they could have just had Excel set up to do it automatically, pull info from other sheets etc. Unforunately - simply because I wasn't offically qualified in Excel - the department would have none of me doing it. I asked them if they would pay the £500 or whatever so I could do the Excel course others had done to get qualified so I could be allowed to do this and they said "no - that costs too much" yet they were trying to make staff cutbacks at the time - the amount of man hours saved with automated stuff on Excel would have been huge.

In the end, I managed to speak to the in-house software developers who were working on the latest version of the databse GUI. I put forward a list of suggested changes and pretty much all of them were implemented, which resulted in the probability of poor data quality on the databse being massively reduced.

buglawton

Companies are as attached to their organisational and workflow clutter as private folks are to their gradually acquired home clutter. A contract cleaner who saw my house would say 'it's obvious that this, this and that clutter should go out immediately' but we probably won't thank the cleaner for the suggestion put that way.

Some consultancies are honed in the real preparation for change - prepare the ground for a cultural shift in the client organisation first, only then send the techies in. These consultancies charge the earth but they do recognise where the invisible walls are.

U4EA_2

I guess the idea is just get skilled, then qualified and see where I can take it from there. Perhaps I should do as my friend's father did and try to find smaller companies that might not be as clued up on the possibilities for some of the things I have mentioned and see where it takes me. I assume that if I canvas a bit, get some work and do a good job then I will be able to get something more stable going.