In this series of blog posts at Chinwag Jobs, we present Secret Diary of a Freelancer, brought to you as part of Xchangeteam’s Freelancer of the Year 2008 awards.

Welcome to my secret diary. It’s secret because I want to be candid and give you the inside track on what my life is like as a freelance gun for hire. It’s warts an’ all but hopefully inspiring in the main, highlighting the highs and the lows of my profession. We freelancers are the future: hear it here first.

Putting a best (first) foot forward in 2009

Our digital marketing freelancer thinks that while others wind down for Xmas, it’s a good time of the year for the freelancers to skill up. Hint: working for other agencies is another way to keep those skills fresh.

Here we are at the end of quite a landmark year for business – 2008. It’s been a relatively quiet month in comparison to most of the 3rd and 4th quarters and it will continue to be so.
Time for a well-deserved rest? Maybe a better thing to do would be to think about updating your skills.

As a freelancer, it’s surprisingly easy to fall behind on the skills front. As a company person, training is par for the course: you have your regular appraisals, your training requirements are at least listened to and more often than not dealt with and tracked. It’s easy to miss out on this process once you step outside the womb of the big corporation – but important not to.

No peace for the self-employed after all, remember. You are always competing against the larger agencies with their legions of well-trained professionals, so it is important that you don’t give them a reason not to use your talents.

At the moment in particular don’t fall behind because you’re not on the same page of the book as everyone else in the marketing potential of FaceBook and the business opportunities Twitter represents. If you are still speaking Web 2.0 you need to be speaking Web 3.0, basically.

One advantage you have as a freelancer that the company drone certainly does not – and it’s worth highlighting! – is that working for an agencies for short assignment can allow you to pick up new techniques and accrue a lot of experience in a very intense way. Training is theory-based, but going to work in a context where that gets tested in practice is the best possible way to skill up.

So my thought is look for an assignment for a spell at a top agency. You will probably be helping global brands, and FTSE 100 companies with commensurate budgets. Working on big-ticket accounts might give you not just a new edge to your skills; it could mean that you get to play with cutting-edge techniques your regular, smaller clients may be too risk averse or budget restricted to be interested in.

So, mix it up, stop working so much for that one smaller agency. Take advantage of the seasonal downtime in your business to get some training over the next few months.

Next year will be tough. But you will be able to weather that storm better if your skills are up to the minute and your experience even more impressive than it already is.