Qualification is the stepping stone for your professional life. Once you’ve acquired market relevant skills, you make a career choice. Yet, which employment type is best for you? Employee, freelancer or entrepreneur? Let’s check this one out the ExperienceZone way.

The three employment types

The world is yours. Especially if you got good grades in school and university. That’s what they tell you at least. Well, that’s only half of the story. The other one deals with your decision along the way. Which major do you pick? Which career path do you choose? And related to that: How you want to start in your career? I studied Business Administration and started to work for a huge consulting company. A great way to learn an grow by supporting various clients in different project formats and roles within.

After you’re a few years into your career, you want to reflect on your progress: How steep is your learning curve? Is learning still the most important criterion in this phase of your professional life? Are you satisfied with the make-up of your career? Periodic checks along the way ensure you to realign yourself to your mission, which is build up on your strengths and ultimately passions. Once you got disconnected from those, you’re not following your heart anymore. Instead you function like a robot, which is programmed to take care of food, clothing and shelter (I know that robots actually don’t need any of those).

As you grow, you want to be aware that the risk-and-reward profiles between the employment types differ. As an employee, you’re contributing to a company. Traditionally you’re receiving a fix salary plus bonus as well as benefits. This is a relative sure-shot with low risk and decent rewards. Once you decide to become a freelancer, you need to acquire customers yourself plus take care of the back-office stuff. The money first flows into your pockets straightaway. Hence, it’s mid risk and mid rewards. As an entrepreneur, you’re running your own business and employ people. This is high-risks (you need to pay their salaries) but can be high reward (since others generate revenue and thus profits for you).

Make career smart decisions

I’m still working as an employee and enjoy doing consulting. In addition I have hobbies, which complement my natural passions, like running ExperienceZone a platform for people to learn and grow. I’m blogging almost daily and share videos. There’re various ways to live your dream, Which one works for you?

  1. Get a skill edge: Qualification is the first step towards a great career. Actually, you need to internalize the concept of life-long-learning. Hence it might make sense to start your career in the corporate world to learn and grow after your initial qualification steps. Dive into the know-what, know-how and know-who in various environment. Get a T-shape skill-set, which means deep functional expertise in one area plus decent experience in related ones too.
  2. Embrace change: Everything changes every moment. This is how our world  are designed. If you let things change your life, you give up control. You work in jobs, which are actually not based on your passions. So, drive change proactively by taking control of your life. This implies regular checkpoints with yourself. Introspection in form of a personality analysis helps you to make up your mind about your career.
  3. Mind the pros and cons: Where there’s light, there’s shadow. Every employment type has up- and downsides attached to it. Being accountable for our employees’ food, clothing and shelter, puts pressure on you as an entrepreneur. Learn to deal with it. Plus mind the prerequisites. Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. This means that before you change your employment type, say from an employee to a freelancer, you want to first establish a network of potential clients before you jump into the cold water.