Learning as a contractor

Ensuring you continue to grow

When you’re moving from company to company every 3-6 months, learning comes in a different form than what you might expect from a permanent position.

In many perm roles, you often have the opportunity to access company paid for learning. Typically in the form of an online platform. You also have access to colleagues you can sit down with and learn from. The latter is also true for some contracts, but you tend to not have the privilege of time when contracting. Especially if it’s a contract where you were brought in because there was some level of urgency.

This is also why I often advise those early on in their career to stick with a perm role, assuming the company has clear growth opportunities. It’s easier to grow when you don’t need to plan for your next role in a few months.

Inside IR35 contracts are somewhere in the middle: access to colleagues and the time to learn - because they’re longer contracts - but often no access to any internal learning tools.

With Outside IR35 contracts, which is typically the reason people become contractors, you have to take learning and growth into your own hands. Even more so than you normally would as a professional.

Those regular check-ins and annual reviews you would have gotten from a manager? You need to do them with yourself.

Are you growing, or just going with the flow?

It’s also a good idea to plan ahead how you would spend your downtime between contracts, when you’re looking for your next gig. These are great times to learn something new in a focused manner you don’t otherwise get.

Another difference with learning as a contractor, is you have the opportunity to be exposed to technology and skills you didn’t expect, and may not have picked up otherwise.

For example, during my time at the Government Digital Service, I worked on a team that managed and secured government domain names. One of my colleagues was a DNS Specialist, and a lot of this role required me to understand DNS at a much lower level than I would have as a regular Software Engineer.

In another contract, the client worked with Serverless technology which wasn't my forte. As soon as I landed the role, I'd have to set some time aside fairly quickly on evenings and weekends to up skill myself with AWS Lambdas, et. al.

Sometimes learning comes in the form of soft skills. I once worked at a VC backed startup that was scaling very fast, with no project managers and little processes in place. There was a lot of misalignment between management and engineers. I had to figure out who stakeholders were for the project I was working on, understand what they needed, and communicate expectations. You couldn't shy away from this because no one would do it for you, and without the clarity you couldn't do your job.

You could argue it's possible to grow as an engineer much quicker as a contractor. But this is only true if you're on the front foot with it. You could end up hardly growing if you expect to be given structured guidance the entire way.

Be sure to have a plan in place, and make the most of the opportunities you get with the various companies and colleagues you end up spending time with.