Over the past two decades, we’ve seen more and more graduates taking low-skilled jobs or caught in underpaid internships in order to earn the experience they need to capture roles in their chosen field. With more and more entry level jobs demanding years of experience, the barrier to entry is at an all-time high.
One way around that barrier may be to move into the contracting sector for your field. Many smaller businesses may not be advertising roles in your field as they don’t have room in the budget for a full-time employee, but they would be happy to see some of the work done on a contracting basis, potentially as one of several clients you could support at once.
This could be a great start to your career. Working with many different businesses, all with different goals, strengths, and weaknesses will enable you to build real experience much faster, which will support you going forward, either to move back into an employee role at a sustainable level or to continue to win business from bigger clients with bigger budgets.
Things to Watch for as a Graduate Contractor
At ICS Accounting we’re dedicated to the support of contractors. Our contractor services include administrative and accounting support as well as contractor tax advice. The contracting sector is an important part of the UK economy, and we want to support contractors in building stress free, efficient working lives.
Many first time contractors will not know about IR35, or have the ability to judge the best way to operate for them out of sole tradership, limited company status, or working within an umbrella company solution. The best strategy will vary from case to case.
It is highly unlikely that a contractor working with several clients at once would be deemed to be operating ‘under IR35’ but there are additional tests that should be checked before making the assumption. In particular, if one client dominates the majority of your attention and requires your work within specific hours, you may well fall under IR35 for that client.
Putting Your Skills to Use
You will also need to hone your skills in winning and building business, soft skills that you may feel lie outside your toolkit.
However, as a recent graduate, you will have learned how to shape discussion in seminars, how to identify the underlying need beneath a question to provide a more detailed answer, and you will have worked in group environments where gaining buy-in is crucial to the success of the project.
It’s very possible that you’ll find working as a group for a business to be more satisfying than those university projects; our experience is that you’ll see more of the people you work with being engaged and ready.
You may also have had to develop your time management skills and even learn aspects of project management (even if you didn’t think of it that way) as nobody but you was responsible for whether or not you hit deadlines during your degree, or the quality of the work you submitted when you did.
To succeed as an undergraduate (and even more so as a postgrad) takes a set of skills which translate brilliantly to the life of a contractor.
Understanding the problem you’re there to fix, assessing the resources at hand, doing research, building a strategy, breaking down the problem and then going to work to produce results – these skills are just as applicable as a contractor as they were in your student days. It’s much less likely that you’ll get to exercise some of those skills early in your career as an employee; much more likely you will be following the strategies and processes laid down by others than building and testing your own.
If that sounds like the way you want to earn your living, ICS Accounting are there to help you handle the parts of it that may be more challenging, keeping your books up to date and in full compliance, helping you understand your financials and plan for the future. Get in touch today.
