Credit crunch turns techies to second jobs

Economic gloom and the rising cost of living in the UK is making IT workers in full time employment take on extra work outside office hours.

Freelance services website PeoplePerHour.com says it currently has 3,500 people offering work in at least one IT-related category, with more than a third (35 per cent) also in full time employment - with this figure rising each month.

The website points to increasing consumer inflation as the main factor driving IT workers to seek ways to supplement their income.

PeoplePerHour.com founder Xenios Thrasyvoulou, said in a statement: "On regular salaries skilled professionals are struggling to make ends meet. It's little wonder increasing numbers of them are harnessing their experience and skills to offer freelance services outside office hours."

One techie feeling the pinch is Kirpal Sachdev, a Prince2 project manager who has taken on extra work through PeoplePerHour.com

He told silicon.com: "I've got a young family and the current environment doesn't look too good and isn't getting better so basically I need a supplement to my current income."

However the extent of this phenomenon is unclear - tech recruitment industry body the Association of Technology Staffing Companies (Atsco) for one said it has not seen any evidence of IT contractors taking on extra work because of economic concerns.

Marilyn Davidson, an Atsco director, said a survey of its members found "the general consensus is they are not seeing any of the contractors being unduly concerned at the moment about the need to find additional work or that their pay is being squeezed".

She added: "Who knows, that may come - but at the moment nobody is finding that is a particular issue."

It's a different story for Sachdev, as freelancing also enables him to flex IT skills that are not required by his day job.

He said: "I also offer programming - HTML, Java, Javascript, etc because I don't get to do that kind of stuff at work but I do have knowledge and skill sets because I've worked in the software development industry as well."

Sachdev said he has taken on "quite a few projects" over the past few months - including, most recently, an ecommerce web design project for myshoewheel.com - but says the rate and size of project work he gets via the website varies, which means the financial supplement varies as well.

He told silicon.com: "There are good months and bad months. During a good month that money is very useful - I can put it away. But there are some months when there's not much work and I don't spend much time doing it so it's a couple of hundred extra a month, which is still good because it doesn't put pressure on my [main] income alone. [I can] use that extra for going out or just to have a better lifestyle."

Discussing how much time he spends doing this extra work, Sachdev explained that while a project may start out requiring a few hours of work per evening, it tends to ramp up towards the end - and can mean burning a lot of midnight oil.

He said: "For example if it's a big project of six months long, every month I agree with the client I'll do two hours a day on a week day and up to about seven/eight hours over the weekend. And when it gets to critical stages on the project - for example the last month - I spend a lot of time doing it and work in the nights until one or two in the morning."

Asked which technical skills are most useful for moonlighting techies, Sachdev said web design programming languages such as Java, Javascript, HTML, CSS and PHP are "very useful". Qualifications such as Prince2 and ISEB can help in understanding end-to-end business processes, he added.

However, Sachdev warned all these tech skills are worthless if you're not rigorously self-disciplined as well - i.e. able to work to dedicated timescales without somebody looking over your shoulder the whole time.

He said: "[You have to be] someone who's got a lot of responsibility and enjoys that aspect of having extra responsibility put on [your] shoulders."

Beyond technical and organisational skills, he said market knowledge and business nous - "so you can pitch yourself correctly and meet the needs of your client by viewing it from their side, understanding what the business needs, what the business requirements are" - is worth its weight in gold.

He added: "Someone who can take something technical and change it into a business idea I think's very useful, and who can communicate on both sides - and also vice versa: taking a business idea and actually producing a document with code in to show the end result with what the customer wanted."