Hey, guys, it's great to see you again.
If you are new here, my name is Bill Benoist.
I'm a certified professional career coach in Silicon Valley.
In today's video, I want to talk about a question that I'm often asked and that is, should I
take a contract position?
Let me tell you, I don't believe in any career coach or any career advisor or anybody really
out there can answer this question for you.
You have to answer it yourself.
You have to answer it based upon your immediate needs and your values and what's most important
for you.
But I can share with you my experience of having taken contract positions.
In the early 1980s, I was in the banking industry.
That's the industry that I started in, I wasn't always in technology.
I was working as a bank manager for savings and loan industries, and this was during the
time of the savings and loan crisis.
What would happen is I'd work a couple of years with a savings and loan, and then the
RTC, which was one of the, I would say, the sister company of the FDIC, they would come
in and they would take over the SNL, they would arrange mergers with maybe another SNL
down the street, that SNL would take the assets but they wouldn't take the people, and, boom,
you're out of work.
Then I would go find another savings and loan that I could work for and be managing them
for a year or two.
The same thing happened again.
In fact, if you think about it, you don't see very many SNLs out there anymore.
But in the early 1980s they were on every street corner.
What happened was, after probably the third or fourth merger and being displaced, I went
back to school.
I took this eight month program on local area networks, wide area networks, and I got into
technology.
Wen I graduated from that program, I immediately took a contract position.
That was by my own conscious decision.
It was by design, whereas a lot of individuals that were graduating from that program waited
and took their first full-time position as a technician, I wanted to do contract.
My first contract position was about a three month position.
It was with Acer computers where I was on a help desk, working, eight hour shifts, very
militaristic where you just sat down and the phone automatically rang, and you answered
it, and you helped that individual on the other end.
I did that for about three months, and then a another recruiter called me and said, "Hey,
we got a great opportunity out here at NETCOM, and NETCOM at the time, if you remember this,
maybe you don't, they were an Internet service provider, and I loved that position for a
couple of reasons.
Number one, my pay went up.
I was almost making as much as I was by this time, after only four months, as my last position
with the savings and loan, but I also loved the Internet.
It was just a lot of fun.
I was learning a lot of stuff from there.
About three months later that contract ended and within a week, I mean, not even a week,
I think it was probably three or four days, I was called by a recruiter to work with a
medical software company where I was providing support to doctors and nurses and hospitals
on this application that was developed.
By this time my pay had actually increased what I was making as a savings and loan manager,
and I did this for maybe three months.
It was short-term contract, and then I was called to work at a semiconductor company
in the Bay Area.
Again, my pay went up, and I was providing some desktop support.
Did this for three months or so, and a recruiter called me and said, "Hey, we got a permanent
position that is open, I think you would be a great fit for."
That was a company that I spent the next 18 and a half years at.
I went in as a senior desktop support specialist.
At the time that I walked away from that 18 and a half years later, I was vice president
information services.
It worked for me, but it's not going to work for everyone because, for me, let me tell
you what some of the pros and cons were.
I think the biggest pro was that, and I see this with just about everybody that works
contract, your salary can go up very, very quickly, and this is a great way to get your
foot in the door if you are doing a career changes, like what I was doing, but you learn
also very quick.
I mean, you're just kind of thrown into the fire.
Maybe for some people that's not the way they like to go.
But when you go through a school, you go through a program, they teach you about all the concepts,
we were learning about routers and TCP/IP, and all of these things.
But then when you get out there, those things break and you need to kind of take what you've
learned, the concepts of it, put it together, and then fix them on the spot.
It really increased my skill set as well.
Also like that, there was no office politics involved because, as a contractor, you're
really not kind of part of the group, which is where all the office politics come in from.
But on the, what I would say the con side of things is that you're also not part of
the group, so you're probably not going to be invited to some of the Christmas parties
or company picnics.
You're not going to be the one that's picked to get to go off to this training for the
next couple of days.
If the company is having some, what I would say challenges, economic challenges there,
the contractors are often the first to be let go, definitely not the stability there.
But then again, I think there's not much stability anymore with anything that we do.
There's no benefits out there.
You're likely not going to have your 401k at this time.
I didn't even have medical through my company, I had to take care of it myself, but that's
been okay because my wife is actually in the medical industry.
She works for a hospital, and our medical is taken care of, so that was okay.
But there was no sick time, there was really no vacation time.
Again, you know, you don't have that inclusiveness there.
But for me it worked, it worked out really well.
Again, you need to kind of come back to what's most important for you, where are you at in
your career, and kind of make the decision based upon that.
I hope this video gives you a little bit of insight into whether or not a contract position
is something that's going to work for you.
If you are in career transition or you're maybe looking for another job, definitely
subscribe to this channel, hit the bell notification, that way you're not going to miss anything
moving forward.
I want to thank you for stopping by and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.