A lot of people are taking their career experience and leaving the 9 to 5 corporate world behind. There is little reason to stay loyal to a company that is unlikely to stay loyal to you so a freelance engineering career often works better for you. Not only that, but since many women are hesitant to work in a male dominated field like engineering, a freelance engineering career path is a great way for them to have a successful career.
3 key factors to pursue a freelance engineering career
Even if you haven’t established yourself with a reputation within the field, you can still often find work as a contract engineer and forgo the corporate experience altogether. In this article, we will give you some things to think about if you want to become a contract engineer freelancer.
1 – Set up your office
Once you are putting yourself out there to find clients, you need to be able to hit the ground running. This means having your home office ready to go is very important as a first step.
You’ll need it set up specifically for work as an engineer. This means having 11×17 printers to print out plans to bring to a worksite, a dual monitor and a good filing system.
You’ll need to have your home office set up for maximum efficiency as well. Have an uncluttered space that will allow you to work unfettered and also so you can use your space for things like a CAD computer and an area for your printer.
If you’re not the type to sit in an office all day and are busy with job contracts, it’s important to still have everything you need for your job in the same way you would have in the office. Having all the right tools for the line of work you specialise in gives incentive for employers to use you, as they don’t need to supply you with expensive equipment.
This can be a massive benefit in highly competitive industries such as avionics maintenance, where having all the ground support tools required from a reputable vendor such as pilot john can be the difference in getting a job contract or not.
2 – Be a marketer
One thing that you don’t have to worry about when you work as an engineer for a company is the marketing. Clients have to be sought out and you have to promote your business to them.
This will be on you to do yourself as you likely won’t have a marketing team behind you. It’s important to remember that you are not just a person when you work as a freelancer, but also a brand.
Use things like social media, Youtube and even a podcast to create a brand behind you that you can build off of to find clients. By building a brand, you will be seen as an authority and trusted figure in your field. It will take a lof of work, but it will generate a lot of client work for you.
3 – Go to trade shows
Networking has been and still is one of the best ways to promote yourself no matter what field you are getting into. Engineering is still seen as one of those jobs that can’t be done from home because you need face to face time with people.
Going to trade shows allows you to do just that. You can find clients and even build a professional network that can help you in your freelancing career. Go to the relevant shows where you can meet people and get your card in their hands. Try to find ways that you can help people and they will surely remember you.
Summary: a great career path
Your areas of work are very diverse. Around every third female engineer finds her way into the secondary sector, for example into the construction industry, energy and water supply, the electrical industry, vehicle or mechanical engineering. Most female engineers, however, are drawn to the tertiary sector. A fifth of them were most recently active in knowledge-intensive services; they could be researchers, for example.
Around 6% of the trained female engineers were active in the field of education and teaching. The limits of the meaningfulness also become clear here: It remains unclear whether the trained engineers actually work in an engineering profession or as managers and professors with an engineering background. One thing is certain, however: little by little more women are getting enthusiastic about the engineering profession.
