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Need some advice, starting a new stage in my life.

5 years ago from Alex Ge

  • James Young, 5 years ago

    If you want to freelance, why not focus on what you're currently skilled at and make your mark there instead of adding a level of complexity to your life by trying to learn coding right now.

    Jumping to freelance comes with a whole other world of time drains (project management, organising your time between admin, generating new work leads, chasing up clients, invoices etc etc etc).

    It's really easy to overlook that when you have the support of a company behind you when you're in full time work and it's something that if you're not ready for it can add a lot of stress to your day and that burn-out feeling you currently have won't be going away any time soon.

    Keep it simple when you look to make the jump - if you're skilled at UI and UX then focus on that. If you have a job doing it, then there should be other opportunities out there delivering a similar service.

    If you're splitting your attention and time by learning coding, you probably won't be skilled enough while you learn to actually bill for the coding you do anyway.

    Just to be clear, I'm not saying never learn coding (it's always good to know), I'm just saying jumping to freelance isn't always easy so minimise the stresses in advance.

    46 points
    • Jon .Jon ., 5 years ago

      This right here is solid advice.

      1 point
    • Hamish TaplinHamish Taplin, 5 years ago

      Agree with this. Futhermore, if you're going to freelance and sell yourself as a guy who can do design/ux AND front-end then you're going to be expected to deliver great quality work in all those things. Learning as you go is going to slow you down massively (so you won't make any money) or produce sub-standard work and damage your reputation.

      Another aspect of this is that you won't find many clients who just want a static website, so you'll get dragged into using Wordpress or another CMS so you'll need to learn back-end code too, along with dealing with databases and servers and stuff which is a whole new level of pain when you're trying to get a project live.

      4 points