I had a steady corporate gig until 2010 when I decided to take a stab at doing contract work.
My third gig was for a large health care company. We completely redesigned and rebuilt one of their web applications. The whole time, my manager kept telling me they were going to convert me to full-time. Since this was only my second contracting gig, I thought I had it made, and stopped talking with recruiters thinking I was about to land a sweet full-time gig.
Two weeks before the project was set to wrap up (we already had a very successful "soft-launch") I was told I'd be done after the launch. I was pretty pissed, thinking I was just taken advantage of, not really understanding this is pretty much par for the course with being a contractor.
I was out of work for just under a month. The rough part was essentially starting from scratch after telling recruiters I wasn't looking anymore. You have to restart contacting your contacts, then waiting for an opportunity to get in front of someone, then get an interview, or two, or in one case, three before hearing back.
At the time I was doing a lot of vanilla front-end work. Lots of static sites, HTML5, CSS3 and some low level Javascript. I didn't have to learn anything new (the era of big JS frameworks and tools was still years away) so my transition was pretty easy from being unemployed to landing my next contracting gig.
The lessons I learned from the experience is to never stop talking to your network and recruiters. Once recruiters think you're off the market, they'll stop contacting you and then its up to you to contact them. It's always good to keep as much information flowing to you as possible, no matter what situation you're in. Even in my last full-time gig, I was still interviewing and talking to people up until I decided to leave.
Also, never assume as a contractor your employer will bring you on full-time no matter what kind of bullshit and blue skies they keep selling you. Always, always, always assume when your contract term is up, that's it and plan accordingly.
My third gig was for a large health care company. We completely redesigned and rebuilt one of their web applications. The whole time, my manager kept telling me they were going to convert me to full-time. Since this was only my second contracting gig, I thought I had it made, and stopped talking with recruiters thinking I was about to land a sweet full-time gig.
Two weeks before the project was set to wrap up (we already had a very successful "soft-launch") I was told I'd be done after the launch. I was pretty pissed, thinking I was just taken advantage of, not really understanding this is pretty much par for the course with being a contractor.
I was out of work for just under a month. The rough part was essentially starting from scratch after telling recruiters I wasn't looking anymore. You have to restart contacting your contacts, then waiting for an opportunity to get in front of someone, then get an interview, or two, or in one case, three before hearing back.
At the time I was doing a lot of vanilla front-end work. Lots of static sites, HTML5, CSS3 and some low level Javascript. I didn't have to learn anything new (the era of big JS frameworks and tools was still years away) so my transition was pretty easy from being unemployed to landing my next contracting gig.
The lessons I learned from the experience is to never stop talking to your network and recruiters. Once recruiters think you're off the market, they'll stop contacting you and then its up to you to contact them. It's always good to keep as much information flowing to you as possible, no matter what situation you're in. Even in my last full-time gig, I was still interviewing and talking to people up until I decided to leave.
Also, never assume as a contractor your employer will bring you on full-time no matter what kind of bullshit and blue skies they keep selling you. Always, always, always assume when your contract term is up, that's it and plan accordingly.