It has become a workplace commonality, finding bright employees feeling frustrated and stagnated in the clutches of their full-time jobs. Often, they can be seen complaining about having little time and no freedom to choose the way they want to lead their lives. If you’re someone who’s feeling that way, freelancing as a career path is something that you may think about.

If we visit the statistics, we can find that our country, Nigeria, is a storehouse to the second highest number of freelance professionals in the world, standing only behind the USA. It’s fairly intuitive to understand these numbers. Nigerian are known worldwide for being extremely skilled and great working partners. English being a popular language in the country helps in breaking continental language barriers and helps freelancers find well paying remote projects across the world, with extremely lucrative pay scales. Even if one looks at jobs within the subcontinent itself, freelancing can come with handsome payouts amidst its other many advantages.

In order to deep dive into the real benefits of working as a freelancer, Fast Jobs spoke to two individuals well qualified to shed light and share experiences on the subject.

Freedom To Choose Clients And Projects

One of the biggest advantages of working independently as a freelancer is gaining the freedom of choice and steering forward without any restrictions. Freelancing makes it very simple for a person to choose the type of work based on what interests and benefits them best.

Immense Flexibility Of Location

Freelancing empowers individuals to lead the much sought after laptop-lifestyle. It comes with immense freedom to work anytime, from anywhere in the world as long as the job is well done and on time. Dany Onyema, “For a freelancer, the most important thing is to deliver quality work and he gets to choose his location of work and has the flexibility of timing.”

An Opportunity To Earn More

Freelancing allows individuals to gain access to clients beyond any geographic barriers, be it different states in the country or even overseas locations.  This helps a person stretch beyond geography and work on what rewards their skill the best. “Today the way business & people work is changing rapidly. Freelancing opens up a new world of opportunities to the global workforce”, suggests Dany.

The next individual Fast Jobs sought views from is Abayemi.  a well-established freelance writer with extensive experience of a decade in freelancing. Her remarkable portfolio glitters with her content contribution in the web development space, in addition to the scripts she’s written for over a hundred plus corporate and ad films.

Here’s what Abayemi has to suggest about the perks of her preferred professional arrangement –

Multi-Faceted Exposure

Freelancing enables faster growth opportunities as compared to any full-time job.  It also helps to nurture great interpersonal skills and the ability to deal with different kinds of situations. This is due to the exposure one earns while working simultaneously in a variety of fields and domains and with different people. “While it’s always good to excel in one subject, freelancing exposes you to various kinds of companies and domains. As a result, you learn more in say five years of freelancing than being in one or two jobs in that same period of time”, shares Abayemi. She suggests that this happens because each time one deals with a new client directly, they are required to start from scratch and figure the entire unfolding process. Moreover, as a freelancer, one is required to build their own work portfolio to establish their credibility. This ends up making them a sales person, a pre-sales person and also marketing executive.

A Chance To Experiment With Your Craft

Another advantage one gains in freelancing is the chance to truly experiment with their skill set. This often manifests into one stretching their own horizon in terms of versatility and reaching their best version. “In my case, when I worked as a writer in my full-time job, I was only writing about my beat – articles and features. When I started freelancing, I learnt blogging, which was quite different from in-depth articles that I was used to.

Become A Better Human Being

A freelancing career can be described to be to the microcosm of one’s whole life. It ends up evolving a person into a better individual. This automatically happens as a part of the process, where one is able to view life as a whole in entirety, something much bigger than a single job or a client. Abayemi shares, “You learn to help each other in the same industry. You see fellow freelancers like your own family instead of rivals. When you have faced non-payment, financially crazy months or difficult clients, you want to protect other freelancers from this kind of stress.”  She shares that her experience as a freelancer has helped her appreciate the beauty of life, something that’s uncertain, yet beautiful and worth living.