Here are 7 key skills an individual freelancer must have. If you don’t have them, you cannot be a developer freelancer, it is as simple as that.
You may be an awesome developer and yet struggle to find clients but your friend who never could match your grades in college or a colleague who could never write better code than you is able to manage lot more client work than you can even imagine.
You know you are a better developer and yet you aren’t able to fetch your first client and the not so technical person can get a client as and when he needs one.
Have you ever wondered why it happens?
It is because, in the freelancing world, clients aren’t looking to hire the best developer but are more interested in hiring the developer who knows what they want and is able to convey themselves as a knowledgeable person and get the project to completion.
Yes, you read it right. Clients are looking for a solution.
Here are 7 key skills an individual freelancer must have. If you don’t have them, you cannot be a developer freelancer, it is as simple as that.
1. Communication skill
Communication skill is the key skill to be a freelancer. Period.
To be an employee, the key skills are more technical in nature but for a freelancer, it is the communication skills that will make or break freelancing career.
For getting a job, there is a technical round of interview to show the technical expertise which spans from few minutes to even hours but for a freelancer, few line in the proposal is all he has to show the technical expertise.
In a technical interview, an interviewer is a technical person who is more interested in knowing your technical expertise but freelancing rules are different.
Clients hiring developers often don’t have the needed technical skills to interview you and so they judge you based on your proposal and if you can make their project a reality. If you can communicate, you are more likely to be awarded the project.
2. Estimation skill
How much time or money it will cost to get the job done for you.
If you price it too low, you will be frustrated with the job and if you price it too high, others will grab the opportunity from you.
The right price can be estimated if you can estimate the complexity of the project. Estimation will improve over time as you become a more experienced developer in a particular technology or niche but you should always try the estimation game even when you don’t need to.
I estimated this article will have 10 skills but I ended up finding only 7.
If you don’t estimate well enough you may end up being paid too low for an overly complex task or may ask too much for an overly simple requirement.
3. Negotiation skill
Clients will always want to get the job done for as little as possible and if you don’t have the right negotiation skills you can be working for too little most of the time.
You will need right kind of negotiation skills to let the client know the value you add instead of the price they pay. Making your services more valuable than the price being paid will help you negotiate better rates.
Should you offer a discount or add more value to the offer. My view is to add more value than making the price cheaper with discount.
4. Problem solving skill
A very important skill for an individual freelancer is to be able to solve problems technically and otherwise.
An employee when working in a team can always refer to an experienced person for typical problems but as an individual freelancer, you need skills to solve those issues.
As an example, Xenforo image uploader on iPhone rotates images because iPhone displays them after changing the orientation from EXIF data and xenForo doesn’t change the orientation based on EXIF data. So the fix is to apply this code in the core of xenForo but it requires Imagick installed on the server.
To test the fix, I wanted to install Imagick on my MAC. After trying for few hours I could not get it done because running those command line tools on a terminal is not my expertise. I moved my test environment from localhost on my MAC to shared hosting where I asked the hosting support to get Imagick installed for me.
Problem solved.
A small fix that I wanted to test before putting it live on client’s server. Was a trivial task and couldn’t ask clients hours of billing either.
So it was important for me to be able to test and apply the fix than to install Imagick on MAC.
5. Delegation skill
Even if you are an individual freelancer, you will not be doing everything from start to finish and will need to delegate few things to others.
As a developer, you may delegate design elements, if you are a web developer you may delegate web design, HTML or CSS. If you are a blogger you can delegate image creation for your post, final publishing of your work, social media marketing, and the list can go on and on.
Delegation is a key skill for an individual freelancer and the growth of a freelancer will depend on how he or she can delegate.
6. Time management skill
Freelancers are able to offer a better price to each client because he is not working for only one of them all the time and is able to slice up his time between multiple clients making it more viable for everyone.
How much one can deliver and what is a suitable deadline that can be feasible is very important. It is different from negotiating a price.
Taking too much work can mean it will be delayed making clients unhappy and taking too little can mean you may have issues paying the bills.
Having the right kind of time management skill to be able to understand when it is too much work and when it is too little is a must for a freelancer.
The ability to make a switch from one technology to other needs good time management skill where dedicating some amount of time to learn the new technology. The time to learn new technology may not be paid right up front by clients but is something that can help in the long run.
7. Marketing skill
The most important skill for a freelancer is the ability to market his or her skills and get paid for it.
Developers often lack marketing skills but freelancing is not about being an awesome developer. Developers willing to learn marketing has more chance of being successful.
Don’t worry. You don’t need to be a marketing guru to be a successful freelancer but you need to be open to learn the marketing skills and tactics to become a highly paid freelancer.
Freelancing is a business and business needs marketing. If you lack the marketing skills, be open to hiring but make sure you have the basic skills to be able to interview a marketer.
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