• I’m a freelance IT Consultant. I have a few small customers who I maintain web applications for and so on, but my main income is from contract consultancy work. I’ve had it great for the last five years with a continually rolling contract working for Nortel. Unfortunately, back in February 2009 Nortel went into Chapter 11 Administration as a way to hold off creditors while the company restructured. However, the management of the company has been unable to achieve this (with many claims of incompetence - http://www.allaboutnortel.com). The department that I was working for provided professional services and solution development. They were always profitable and very busy, with an order backlog usually around 3-4 months. Sadly, the lack of progress in restructuring caused this backlog to dwindle down to nothing and thus a highly skilled team of both permanent and contract staff have been culled. Now this part of the business is worthless as it was the skill of the team that made the profit and this is lost. Crazy.
• Anyway, I’m back on the contract market and boy have things changed since my last visit. Back when I was last looking (2003) there were at least 3 or 4 pages of relevant jobs. Agents were biting off my hands for work, contacting me in minutes of submitting my CV and phoning almost every hour to update me on progress with my application. Now, it’s very different! I’m lucky if there is one job per week that matches my skill set and preferred working area. For some reason agents have become much less communicative. Quite often I’m sending of a CV and having to chase the agent up after a couple of days to find out if they received it or not. I’m then not hearing anything back from them for days. You’d think in this age of financial turmoil that they’d be keen to get contractors on board, or perhaps it’s reached the stage where contractors are two-a-penny and the agents don’t care any more (did they ever?).
• So where are all the contract jobs? I’ve been through lean times before (dot-com bubble era) but even then the contract market held up to some extent. Are companies just not doing any projects? Are they employing permanent staff instead on much lower salaries? Hopefully things will pick up after the summer break.
• In the mean time I’m working on updating my skill set by learning Ruby and Rails.

Tags: contract