Clients

Lenovo, Equifax, Bank of America, ACT

Background

Contract positions are typically organized by a third-party agency, such as vendor and/or recruiter. Instead of contacting the company directly for employment opportunities, the worker goes throug the hiring process with a recruiter, who then vets the worker directly. After the initial vetting process, the worker is then passed to the company's direct hiring manager and possibly hired for a position. 

Most of my work after returning to the United States has been contract work. The benefits of contract work is that the effort of looking for a job is leveraged by recruiters instead of yourself. Large corporations that have numerous jobs available instead depend on recruiters who contact you directly. Another benefit of contract work is increased wages, offered in exchange for temporary employment.

Some contract positions will be extended based on the quality of your work, while the length of other contract positions are based strictly on the budget that the hiring company has for that fiscal year.

The disadvantages of taking contract positions include not having a stable forecast of employment as well as being separated from full time employment opportunities with the actual company.

Summary

Contract work is practically the bread and butter of today's IT industry. Due to IT's ever changing direction, it is not always guaranteed that a company will require a worker's skill for more than one year, as the company may choose to use some other technology at which current workers may not be proficient.

I enjoy contract work because of the increased wages as well as being constantly on my toes to increase my expanse of knowledge and learn newer and different technologies.

I have contracts as short as four months (ACT) and other contracts as long as a year and a half (Bank of America).

Contracts also are more likely to request bleeding-edge or the latest technologies for their projects. Unlike many long-term or full time positions, which may require the worker to use older technologies that may not be useful after their employment at a particular company.

You will find that many of my latest career choices have been specifically with contracts. This is due to the shift in web development towards JavaScript based front end frameworks and also JavaScript server side technology such as MongoDB and Node.js.

The first opportunities to learn newer technologies often come from shorter contracts, in which corporations may want to pay someone to research and then implement a newer technology before adapting it across more teams within their organization.