Get your questions about working as a contractor, free-lancer or other self-employed Tester answered

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If you have questions about being self-employed as a tester – ask them here… :slight_smile:

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How do you find opportunities as a contract tester?

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In the UK it’s getting harder, with the proposed (and currently delayed) change in the law regarding tax (and lack of protections and workers rights, despite having the change to “employee” status for tax). I can’t comment for other countries. I find more roles advertised for automation than manual (exploratory) testers (which is me). It’s gotten really patchy in the last few years.

My tips as a UK contractor are:

  1. Networking. IMO, this is by far the most effective way to find work. Old colleagues, people you met in events/meetups/conferences.
  2. YunoJuno.com a platform where companies can shortlist you for roles. Also used by the big ad agencies. has no costs to you as a contractor.
  3. LinkedIn, or other job boards. This I find to be the least reliable way personally.

Re UK working, I have a guide to getting started and what you can earn, and how to structure your company and salary/dividends split.

Here’s my guide.

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I work with a few (selected) agencies I found I can trust over here in Germany.
Occasionally a possibility pops up over on Twitter, too. — And in one case even lead to a longer running project. I like Xing, too. In Germany it works well for me.

I believe that the important thing in the early days is to get to know many people (not just those how have projects available, but also this hw know the one who do).

Last but not least: Attending and speaking at conferences helped finding great projects.

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It helps to be able to show actual work.

That can be conference sessions, publicly available bug reports (open source projects!), and maybe even writing books or contributing to books (to me this turned out to be a lot less intimidating than I thought i would be).

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@mjruttenberg @seasidetesting
how are you folks finding it now with the changes to ir35 taken effect(im assuming they have)

I have been contemplating making the switch to contracting for a while so the information provided in the guide was incredibly helpful!!

What sort of skill sets do you see repeating on contractong jobs? Eg I have extensive knowledge in manual and automation using selenium with java and C# from UI perspective but my api and services testing skills are admittedly lacking…just havent been required on the projects iv been involved in.

If i make the move away from a fulltime position, it will be in a few years when im not dependant on childcare etc so i want to use that time to enshure im getting the skillset ill need when the time comes!!

I recently moved from an automation lead role into test architect responsible for 5 different scrum teams with about 20 test engineers total so im not as involved with the code anymore and focus more on ensuring coverage, metrics and processes etc are followed in the project as a whole. Do you see many lead contractor roles? Or would the majority of them be at team level etc? Im concerned this current role could be a detriment to my future plans.

Thank you in advance for any information you provide!!

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I have contracted for a year, between jobs.

  1. make sure you move at least after a year, if not you are not learning anything new and you are loosing value
  2. hit up all your previous employers, some of them would love temporary help, don’t stay long
  3. github, blogs do both, a lot, be seen professionally
  4. linkedin and every other jobseeking platform under the sun, they work when you focus
  5. get an accountant and pay them to do your books, do not use an umbrella
  6. pay for online learning and your own training (it’s a tax break if you did step 5 right), without these you are just another candidate
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