The advantege of working with Freelancers

Prejudices about the freelance career

The years of experience as a civil engineer in Spain have shown me a series of very common prejudices among my colleagues. We take it for granted that high quality engineering can only be performed by large engineering consultant firms with hundreds or thousands of employees and a strong corporate image. On the other hand, some firmly believe that a particular professional´s technical skills has a direct relationship to the company´s annual turnover.

Undoubtedly those large consultant companies have at their disposal the technical and human resources to face the great challenges of today´s engineering. These resources are generally  not at a freelancer´s reach.

Many times I have heard disparaging adjectives from my colleagues towards freelancers, such as “homemade engineering”-as a way to express that an average freelance exerts their  professional activity with a PC, an ink-jet printer, and a small desk located in a small corner of their house.

I ask myself a simple question-is anything elsenecessary for a skilled and experienced engineer to perform good engineering? With settled knowledge, common sense, the temporary union with other freelancers and an Excel spreadsheet, an expert engineer is able to face almost any engineering challenge without belonging to a large organization, which all of us know has its strengths and weaknesses. 

Successful experiences in other countries

The American experience and tradition in different fields such as the film industry or engineering has demonstrated the feasibility and optimization of the freelancer´s work when they temporarily unite to fulfill a project of any kind.

This is the idea that we would like to introduce in Spain. Unfortunately, the current economic crisis has put thousands of skilled Spanish engineers on the black list of the unemployed, or forced their immigration to emerging countries. This is a real leakage of talent that will profoundly affect Spain in the medium term.

Nowadays the market is full of professionals eager to offer their specialized services. We propose a positive way out of this undesirable situation based on the creation of freelancers´ temporary consortiums that are formed when needed in order to achieve a common goal.

The advantages of contracting freelancers

The savings isobviousin the structural costs with freelancing, making us more efficient and competitive, and what is more important, without a loss of quality in the final product.

Taking into account the savings and austerity policies imposed on the Spanish government by our richer partners in the European Union, it would be positive for the administration to actively promote these kinds of initiatives, which would create thousands of jobs and avoid the exodus of talented professionals to other countries that haven´t paid the high cost of higher education. 

Assuming the fact that Europe can no longer compete industrially against emerging countries such as China or India, we are selling our main resources to those countries at a very low price, that is: professional advanced services, know-how, and high level advanced education.