Five Essential Skills for Freelancers
Are you considering taking up freelancing as your next career path? Or are you already a freelancing pro ready to upgrade your skills? A successful freelancer doesn’t just focus on technical know-how. Building a series of soft skills is key to helping your business succeed and render your clients more satisfied. Here are five essential skills for freelancers that will set you up for success.
1. Time Management
In today’s fast-paced work environment, good time management is key to maintaining the freedom and flexibility of freelancing work. As award-winning global entrepreneur Kelly Jamieson said in her interview with Freelancing Gems, by working with a list and planning your day out in blocks, you will be able to better organise your work and spend your time more productively.
One excellent time management method for the self-employed is the Pomodoro Technique. Following the Pomodoro Technique, you work in focused intervals, taking a five-minute break every 25 minutes and a longer break every 100 minutes. Research has found that by taking such scheduled breaks and working in intervals, you can actively improve your work stamina.
2. Budgeting & Financial Literacy
Being a freelancer means wearing multiple hats often at the same time. Aside from providing professional services to clients, you also need to develop financial literacy and budgeting skills that go beyond understanding a P&L (profit and loss sheet) into really understanding the data that leads to good decision-making and risk mitigation.
Building financial literacy and budgeting skills is an essential skill for freelancers and often requires a learning process. Why not try enrolling in online courses such as the Freelancer Foundations course as a first step to building financial literacy? After learning what managing your freelancer finance is all about, you can choose to move on to more advanced courses or try out the many finance management and budgeting tools available such as Xero and Quickbooks.
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3. Adaptability
The freelancing world is a dynamic and ever-changing place. Workplace adaptability skills allow freelancers to respond effectively to different scenarios and challenges within their freelancing businesses.
Harvard Business Review suggests three elements to cultivate that “deliberate calmness”.
- First, try to develop learning agility by learning from experience and approaching situations with a growth mindset.
- Second, practise emotional self-regulation. Consider writing down the moments when you feel emotionally triggered. After a week’s time, you will be able to see a pattern which allows you to get a better understanding of your emotions and start developing a coping mechanism to deal with unhelpful ones.
- Finally, using these two skills you just gained, it’s time to practise dual awareness to integrate internal circumstances with external ones. You will gain a better understanding of what the situation calls for and actively adapt your emotions and habits to it.
4. Problem Solving Skills
Being an agile problem-solver means you can bounce back from challenging situations more easily and have stronger burnout resistance. When it comes to problem-solving, there are a wide variety of techniques and tools to choose from. One of the most commonly used ones is the ‘Trial and Error Technique’. By experimenting with different ways to solve a problem and eliminating errors along the way, you will be able to locate the ideal solution through practice. However, there is no magic bullet to problem-solving, it’s important to find the technique that works best for you.
5. Customer Service
Delivering good customer service is a key part of freelancing. It is one of the most essential skills for freelancers to master. Excellent customer service skills not only help you win clients but also keep them. When it comes to improving your customer service skills as a freelancer, it’s important to keep in mind several principles:
- Be clear, be firm and be concise – make sure your clients understand what to expect from you.
- Try to over-deliver but don’t over-commit. Understanding your capacity is key to successful freelancing.
- Analyse your business’s needs and consider adopting customer service tools if needed. There are lots of CRM tools available such as the HubSpot Service Hub that make it easier to engage with customers, gather their feedback and really upgrade your business to the next level.
