Hey fellow UX professional contractor. I've totally become complacent in some areas as I approached fire.
Less professional development. My current manager even asked me if there was anything I wanted to do, and I drew a total blank.
I do however always keep my portfolio up to date, and jump into new tools. Because I've effectively hit my minimum FIRE number I'm in no way concerned about breaks between contracts. It also helps that I'm confident in selling my services, and don't take low paying gigs.
I'm surprised to hear there's market saturation in the UK. Lots of opportunity down here during COVID due to no one being able to bring in designers from overseas.
Yes there is saturation and I don't think it's just in the UK. I've seen around few stories of UX graduates having trouble to get a job, and there are now even forums and coaching groups helping them finding jobs.
One of the results is that employers are able to ask for more and pay for less. Now the majority of contracts available are asking for UX/UI (in the past it was either one or the other) AND at a lower rate than 2 years ago (the rate dropped significantly after COVID).
I have a couple of colleagues UX who took courses to get up to date doing UI design in order to catch up with the market, even though they have 5-10 years of exp.
I didn't do that. I didn't try to learn UI. I didn't try to get more experience in UX research either. So now I can only apply to a small niche of contracts making it quite difficult to find something.
I've been doing that for years, but it looks like it's reaching the breaking point now...
What sort of rate could a UX earn in NZ? Maybe I should apply there if work dries up where I am lol
@CrabbitDutchie, my rate is not overinflated, it's actually below the median rate so that I can secure a contract. You can see a benchmark here (
https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contract.aspx?q=ux&l=&id=0&p=6) with median day rate between £450 and £550.
I take contracts from £450/day in order to secure something...
These rates are actually standard in the IT contract market. You can check around. We are paid a premium because we don't have job security, we are a disposable workforce for a company.