Digital and marketing freelancers and umbrella company contractors are positively raking it in right now, according to a new report from APSCo.
The industry body just reported that digital and marketing sector companies are scrambling to find permanent employees for vacant positions right now, with something like a 20 per cent vacancy rise in the market. Not only that, but placements have gone down by an additional six per cent – leaving self-employed Brits once more cleaning up after the mess.
This is of course nothing new under the sun, if you ask me; freelancers and contractors have been plugging holes for what seems like years now since the skills shortage took hold of the British economy. APSCo says much the same, though it pointed out that there’s probably more at play than just permanent workers being too incompetent as usual – it looks like pay packets in the sector are going down instead of going up, which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. I mean if you were trying to attract the best talent possible out of a very small field of candidates that continues to dwindle wouldn’t you ratchet up your remuneration packages as high as you could?
Apparently not, or not at least in this particular industry, where salaries for permanent workers have actually declined by three per cent. That just seems patently ridiculous to me – and probably anyone else with more than two brain cells to rub together – but nobody ever said you had to be smart to work in management.
Well, whatever the reasoning, the result is that freelancer and contractor take up in the industry has gone up by 15 per cent over the last 12 months. That spells fantastic news for the nation’s interim workers, but since it’s at the expense of permanent employees this makes it a bittersweet victory to be sure. Everyone likes to think that freelancers and traditional employees are at odds when it comes to the marketplace, but that’s essentially untrue – while poor economic times usually see contract workers’ fortunes rising as those of traditional employees fall, it’s better overall for an economy to be humming along, firing on all cylinders, instead of limping along with its motor clogged. Truly only the misanthropic of contractors will revel in the poor fortunes of salarymen, don’t you think?
