I just came from an event that Lea hosted, an event that exposed me, for the first time, to a new breed of freelancers. I am a freelancer myself—always was, always is—although I no longer call myself that.
After finishing my studies in 2013, I decided to have a “gap year” to think about what I really wanted to do with my life. Why I needed that time for myself is a story for another time. But suffice to say, a traditional 9-5 job will not allow me to have that time and space to learn about myself better. So I decided to devote a big chunk of my first year out of college to introspection and personal development while teaching ESL to Japanese students in the evenings to support myself financially.
I was part of that early to middle wave of Pinoy freelancers, who found work primarily through middle-men platforms like Rarejob, Essays.ph, UpWork, Fiverr, etc. These were platforms that treated freelancers like commodities, paying us with “barya” in exchange for promises of a more flexible schedule. We were practically paid laborers without benefits, but we didn’t see this as a bane as much as the newer freelancers see it now, just because working at home on your pajamas was a pretty exciting opportunity in the early 2010s, especially for moms with newborns or lazy socially anxious people like me who didn’t thrive in office politics.
Times have changed, for the better, for most of us freelancers, and meeting these new breed of freelancers a while ago reassured me of that. Although I was never really part of that change, I managed to flow with it, somehow, mostly by discovering what works for myself. I learned to look for higher paying gigs at foreign job boards instead of Upwork. These highly flexible and good paying projects allowed me to have as much time for myself as possible. Money was not really my goal. Time was what was really important to me. It still is. I wanted to develop my creative writing as much as possible and I am simply using freelancing to sustain that. I never really built a brand or platform or client base. I kinda played with it in the past but failed. And that was okay. Freelancing was not my calling anyway. It was simply a tool to support my real calling. I have succeeded! I now spend more time doing my “real work” and spend just enough days working per month. For now, this way of freelancing was enough. And that is what’s amazing about freelancing! There is no one-size-fits-all way of doing it. You can enter it with your own unique goals and make it work for you. Sure there are best practices to make sure you continue to earn through it. But other than that, you find what works for you. That’s what “free” means in freelancing. And that ability to design how you work in accordance with your preffered lifestyle, is something that is very, very difficult to find in traditional employment.
That said, one of the most popular criticisms to freelancing or entrepreneurship or working for yourself is that it is a less secure form of employment. By “less secure”, critics mean it pays less and income is fluctuating (and, therefore, unreliable). Then they would add, you don’t get “benefits” that 9-5 workers get.
”Wala kang patutunguhan diyan,” I once heard a critic say to a fellow freelancer.
This criticism usually comes from those who know nothing about the business world, who never tried starting a business themselves, which already makes their criticisms highly questionable. That said, there is indeed some truth to their criticism. A good number of freelancers and entrepreneurs struggle and give up on their first year. But almost all of them were doing freelancing the wrong way! And this is my main point: done correctly and designed carefully, freelancing is way, way more secure than a 9-5 job.
If you have kept at the very least a part-time job and built an emergency fund while you are experimenting with freelancing on the side, if you have developed a skill or a set of skills that a specific group of people would pay a premium for, if you have set up systems to attract, convert, retain, and encourage referrals, if you have a strong support system of fellow freelancers, and if you have learned personal finance so your hard-earned money is not put to waste, you will be more secure—far more secure—than your 9-5 counterpart. I am confident of this.
Why? All because of one word: resilience.
A well-trained freelancer is more resilient than a well-trained employee. An employee is usually only trained at one job and only knows how to do that job in a fixed setting. He also is conditioned to rely on a single source of income, which comes in a regular monthly rhythm. Because he spends 9-5 at work plus the commutes to work, most days he arrives at home tired with no time nor energy to learn new skills or start new sources of income.
If there is anything we learned about work from COVID, it is that we no longer live in a fixed environment. Nothing is already truly “stable.” The new world of work favors those with a wider spectrum of skills and who are very “comfortable” to change.
Now consider the freelancer. The freelancer has to learn a lot of things to keep her business afloat and to serve her clients better. Most freelancers nowadays offer different skills which they bundle through different packages, and if those skills get obsolete, they are very comfortable learning new skills that they can profit from.
Aside from this, a freelancer is comfortable with fluctuating income. Yes, newbie freelancers are overwhelmed with this. It causes stress to them but rightfully so. Most of them are transitioning from traditional jobs that paid them on a regular time monthly. But pro freelancers know the importance of saving for an emergency fund which covers their expenses at times of income fluctuation. Most well-trained freelancers are very very comfortable in a recession or an unstable economy, like what we are currently having worldwide. The best freelancers do not rely on a single source of income, they establish several businesses which diversify their risks, and they are only able to start multiple businesses just because they have more time than their 9-5 counterparts.
In addition, the barriers to entry to freelancing are diminishing by the day. While you might need to get a degree or certificate or even license to work at 9-5 jobs, a lot of freelancers start their businesses just by self-directed learning, mostly through the Internet, which makes freelancing even more accessible. You don’t need to pay tuition to be a freelancer. Some of the most successful freelancers I personally know are college dropouts.
Theoretically, freelancing is a more resilient, lucrative, and potentially rewarding option even in a poor country like the Philippines, and the many success stories from this new breed of Pinoy freelancers are convincing me that it is practically better—way better than traditional forms of employment.
I am very optimistic that freelancing will soon be adopted by industries and fields that don’t use it right now in the country. For example, how can we make good use of the hundreds (perhaps, thousands?) of Pinoys with advanced degrees, especially academic degrees (masters and PhDs), who currently don’t have jobs (because academia is notoriously bad at giving people jobs and having them keep them!)? I am excited for the day when “freelance philosophers” or “consultant sociologists” shall become lucrative career options in the Philippines.
And all these fact-based optimism, which I share with many, is the reason why I just couldn’t wrap my head around this antiquated idea that the ONLY way to be financially stable and secure is to get an in-demand degree at a leading university and then work as a 9-5 employee at a decent company until you are aged 60.
That narrative has already changed. It started to change when Pinoy freelancers refused being paid “kakapirangot” for their services and the pandemic has only accelerated that change. And if there’s anything constant about what I am seeing among this new breed of Filipino freelancers, it is that they won’t ever stop proving their critiques wrong.
”May patutunguhan sila.”