How Can Freelancing Help Me Balance Family and Career? ⋆ Nation1099

The number one thing you can do to balance family and career is to go freelance.

My colleagues and I have done a summary of all the relevant workforce and gig economy data, and the issue of balancing family and career leaps out over and over. In one survey after another, the biggest drivers of the growth of freelancing boil down to three things:

A desire for more flexible work arrangements than employers are providing
A desire for more remote work arrangements than employers are providing
A desire for better work/life balance.

You might think that technology is driving the growth of freelancing, but it appears that technology is releasing pent-up demand for independent careers that has already been there. Workers are desperate for a better balance between family and career, and to get it many are choosing to build freelance careers.

How many? Well, right now at least 11 percent of the U.S. workforce is full-time freelance.

That means that one in nine of your former colleagues aren’t at another company in town. They’re working independently.

This population of full-time freelancers has doubled in the last ten years, and the growth projections are 3.5 percent per year.

Admittedly, not everyone is going into this willingly, but most are, especially among creative and managerial workers. Highly-skilled professionals are rarely pushed into freelancing unwillingly by economic distress. As this article describes, we are now in the freelance by choice era.

Instead, the new career freelancers are in full flight from W-2 based roles that they find incompatible with the family life that they want. More than 80 percent of full-time freelancers say they strongly prefer this way of working, and more than half say they wouldn’t go back to W-2 roles at any price.

Granted, freelance businesses are rarely overnight successes. It takes a lot of work to build them up to a sustainable level. And it definitely is possible to create another lousy job for yourself that doesn’t leave any time for family. But the surveys and the growth of freelancing indicate that the opposite is more likely. Freelancing is the clearest way to balance family and career.