I am not sure why the power (or danger) of the global economy never really hit me before,
but I was checking out elance.com as it was mentioned in a recent book I read. If you don’t know, elance is a services marketplace. Anyway, I searched on there for design providers. Guess what, 11,144 companies and individuals popped up. What is really cool is that you can filter that list down by number of reviews, how positive those reviews are, and more.
The clincher is that many of the best rated firms were not US based. Interestingly, a large chunk of the ones that caught my eye were not India based either. Bulgaria? Argentina? Who knew?
This is really important when you consider a few years ago you’d be dropping well over a hundred dollars an hour for a solid web designer and even more for flash skill. In a whopping 5 minutes I found a handful of very well rated firms with large portfolios of good work for $20 - $30 per hour. If you are in need of these skills, it’s good news. If you do this for a living, it might be a bit scary. From my perspective, this underscores the need for a personal brand, discussed earlier.
So the question is, are you next? And are you ready for that?
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4 Comments
I hope not. Looks like blogging gets as cheap as $10/hour. Yikes.
I have friends who works part-time on web designs. Better not let them know to avoid a heart attack.
I am next I’ve been put “at risk of redundancy” over here in the sunny UK, where IT departments with actual IT capability are dying out in favour of service management. It’s sad, upsetting and more than a bit galling especially considering companies and the government over here are always complaining about the lack of skilled workers while at the same time as dropping vast numbers of them.
Think about your current company vs. where you were ten years ago. Even if it’s the same company, there are a lot more service providers engaged now.
You can outsource pretty much every function, whether hardware, software or people. Crazy. Maybe I’m too much of a dinosaur and need to get with the new program as a product manager for hire.