The UK’s freelance economy is booming; at least that’s the view of People Per Hour.
The online jobs marketplace recently published the results of their Small Business Survey 2010 which show that leveraging the power of the freelance marketplace is now becoming the norm amongst SME owners.
50% of small businesses have increased their usage of freelancers compared to 2 years ago. Cost is now considered less important as employers look for experience and quality to meet their short-term needs.
Speedy access to people with specialist skills is cited as the principle reason for hiring freelancers and nearly 60% of the survey's respondents said they prefer to hire local freelancers as opposed to outsourcing projects offshore.
Small businesses have seen the value of embracing new technology with 20% selling their products or services entirely over the Internet and 37% operating virtually.
The IT and web development sector is one area where small businesses are gaining enormous benefit from highly skilled freelancers. More than 60% of SMEs plan to increase their IT spend this year and 38% intend to use freelancers to do new projects. A lot of small businesses use a mix of full-time and freelance staff with the freelancers being used for the more specialised work.
However, 56% of SMEs would like to see easy ways to distinguish the quality freelancers in the community.
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