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The tech field has a vital role to play in building a more equitable, fairer, more creative and more efficient future. The rapid pace of digitisation across all industries, exacerbated by COVID-19, has meant the contract and contingency recruitment markets have exploded as firms around the country try and hasten the process to meet targets with an increasingly decentralised and remote team, as quickly and securely as possible. 

Contingent working isn’t for everyone. It’s fast paced, high risk and results driven. 

It requires multi-skilled workers who are able to build relationships quickly. It demands flexibility and often asks you to step into a role where you’ll be expected to deliver results while training or augmenting a full time contracted team. In essence, you’re a mentor, a team player, a project manager and a leader in one fixed term arrangement. 

In the tech world, however, contracting has become both necessary for businesses to engage with, and a healthy, well paid option for specialist workers across the industry. As the country, and the wider world, has reacted to the explosion of COVID-related work place changes, digitisation erupted at an unprecedented pace. The New Normal is Tech-led, and the contracting environment has borne witness to the rise and rise of tech specialist need. 

More and more people, especially millennial workers, Gen Z and the next generation of tech-orientated professionals, are not only happy working flexibly across short term or fixed term contract roles, but are eagerly advertising themselves as portfolio workers – able to work across multiple contracts and with a variety of employers, where they can experience, and learn, from multiple workplaces. 

Taking advantage of this is an important first step in recognising that you can minimise the risk of finding your next role, or extending your current role by understanding the processes inherent in contract work, and taking stock of your specialities and network.

At the core of contingent working is the intrinsic risk of attaching yourself to short term, high reward roles – generally, competitive and above-market compensation is the immediate reward for roles with little future proofing – and, in an era of uncertainty in almost every other industry except tech and the app economy, how you extend contracts, build networkers and own the opportunities that come before you are vitally important in ensuring career security.

What’s the difference between you and a peer? To you, it’s obvious – a lifetime’s worth of desire and effort to learn and perfect a certain skill or build a career; experience and vision; your own personal story and mind-set, unique amongst all people…but to a prospective employer, you’re their future and, crucially, they don’t know you yet.

Job hunting at the best of times is not easy – it requires equal parts motivation, graft, patience and luck. In the age of COVID, the hunt has only got harder. With swathes of people around the world facing turbulence in their employment status, positioning yourself as someone an employer cannot live without has become a task in perseverance.

Trying to summarise 2020 and the extraordinary, not to mention global, changes to how people work, commune, socialise and thrive is virtually impossible – unprecedented gets rolled out, but even that doesn’t quite capture the magnitude of cultural shift. The rise and slow fall of COVID as an arbiter of living continues at pace, but 2021 is around the corner. Are some of the changes to stay?

The global Tech field is virtually unrecognisable from last year – country by country Tech has filled a necessary gap as industries battle with COVID-related changes, and Australia has been no different.

A good recruiter will tell you Recruitment is all about the numbers – through diligent screening of a wide range of candidates, you’ll eventually find a diamond in the rough, and deliver for your client. A great recruiter will tell you recruitment is all about relationships and advocacy – build a framework of trust and consistency, and clients will come to you.

This year has ushered in a tidal wave of changes to work places across the world and in every sector, none more so than in Tech. From entire industries pivoting online and the inexorable rise of ecommerce to bolster businesses with reduced physical capacity; to operating and managing dispersed teams via workforce solutions, and, crucially, moving the entire hiring ecosystem online, Tech is having its vital and inescapable moment.