Why You Should Become a Freelance Developer Today

This is the first article in our series on “How to Become a Freelance Developer”

The world is changing and companies are changing with it. Talent is not a local game anymore, and companies have to adapt in order to get access to the best software developers. Talent is evenly distributed around the world.

Even though talent is evenly distributed, opportunities are not. If you're a passionate and smart software developer who wants to gain access to great professional opportunities, you need to play the global game.

Fortunately, playing this global game has become easier than ever. We are living in times of abundance, and this applies to remote opportunities for software developers. Let’s take a look at a real example.

I wrote this article while traveling near Đà Nẵng, in Vietnam. I just used indeed.com to search for software development jobs around here, and this is what I found:

As you can see, there are only 27 full-time positions for software developers around here. Now, if my life and community are in Đà Nẵng and I want to stay here, I have two options: I can either compete really hard to get one of those 27 jobs, that most likely won’t be the best paid or most interesting job in the world, or I need to find jobs outside Đà Nẵng.

Does that mean I have to leave my life and community behind? Professional and personal choices shouldn’t be in conflict. They should be aligned and work together. The best way to achieve that is to break free from the barriers location-specific jobs impose, and join the global remote workforce.

If I run the same search in indeed.com, but this time I select “Remote” as location, I get 1,049 results for full-time jobs.

Much better, right? Well, kind of. Having more options means that, most likely, there will be more interesting and better paid opportunities among them, but it also means I will now have to compete with developers around the world to get that job. Sounds tough, right?

Well, here is the answer to that problem: before you can get one of those jobs, you need to prove that you are an outstanding remote developer. The good news is that you don’t need to be a senior developer with more than 15 years of experience to prove that. In fact, many of those companies would be glad to give an opportunity to someone that is early in their career, if that person already knew how to work as part of a remote team.

How do you get that experience if you can’t get a remote job first? You have to become a freelance developer first!

On upwork.com, one of the leading online freelance platforms, there are almost 27,000 projects looking for a developer right now, and new projects are added every minute. Freelancer.com shows 133,231 additional projects and there are many other platforms you can also check out.

Can you really land one of those projects without much experience or a portfolio? The answer is, “Yes”.

At Microverse, we run a full-time program to train remote software developers where we ask students to dedicate 15 to 20 hours per week to working on freelance projects. Most of our students come with nothing to show in their portfolio and they start sending proposals to projects in upwork.com and freelancer.com from their first day. They normally get their first approved project within the first week in the program.

So now, you can see WHY you need to tap into this opportunity and break free from geographical boundaries in your professional and personal life. In the next article in this series, we'll share HOW you can make this happen.

If you're ready to become a world-class software developer, while learning with a supportive online community check out Microverse.