The most frequent two questions for ContractorCalculator’s Contractor Doctor are: ‘Am I too young to go contracting?’ or ‘Am I too old to be a contractor?’ Because successful contracting is all about teamwork, an effective project team will have a blend of skills and experience, which means contractors of all ages are welcome and needed. So the answer to both questions is a resounding ‘no’.
Although every contractor is different, I’ve seen trends emerge that prove new and young contractors have as much to offer as older hands. And older workers are never over the hill, even though their younger colleagues might think so. A good contract team will have a combination of both, because both bring value to the table.
Let’s look at IT as an example. Young developers fresh out of an IT consultancy body shop or even, on occasion, fresh out of university, are keen, cheap, work hard and tend to be usefully ‘geeky’ out of work. That ‘geekiness’ means they often spend their personal time playing around with the latest gadgets and reading up on the latest trends. So, if you’re a client project manager or an older contractor, they can keep you up to date and help ensure the maximum future-proofing is built into each contract. They challenge the status quo, which may no longer be working for you, and also ask all those seemingly daft, but very important, simple questions, like, ‘why do you do it that way?’
I’d want young contractors on my team if I was developing bleeding edge applications with a short shelf life, or needed some high-end creativity. But I’m not sure I’d want a recent graduate going solo managing a legacy system migration for a global insurance business, or dealing with a post-acquisition secure network merger for a defence engineering firm.
That’s when I’d have some older hands around to help me out. Older, and safer, hands who use skills already tried and tested and that I know about, and who also keep themselves updated with the latest advances in their particular field. They have huge experience, and sometimes charge equally huge fees, having done this kind of project for similar organisations a dozen times before.
When it all goes wrong, they are the rock and the port in the storm into whose trust you can place the financial security of millions of people across the world. But I’m not sure I’d want an older hand to lead the team, or my business, into brand new areas completely alone.
That’s why, ideally, I’d like both kinds of contractor on my team, because between them, they’ve got all my bases covered. And that’s why when the Contractor Doctor gets asked the ‘am I too old or too young’ question, the answer is always ‘no’.