Event Details

This workshop will help you to understand the realities of freelancing, consulting or running a side-hustle, and develop strategies to overcome the most common challenges.

Increasing numbers of students and graduates enhance their earnings and develop their professional capabilities and experience through freelancing, either as part of a portfolio of work or as a complete career pathway. This might start out as an informal online side-hustle or even a hobby but has the potential to develop into something both fulfilling and profitable, enabling greater autonomy and flexibility around how people earn a living. This is true for artists, designers and other creative practitioners, digital and technical developers and coders, marketing and management consultants, as well as online influencers and streamers.

None of this is to say that it’s an easy choice. All career pathways involve negotiating all kinds of challenges and working for yourself – frequently by yourself – requires resilience and self-discipline. But anyone who has made it work will attest to the sense of personal satisfaction and other benefits that have resulted.

This programme is aimed at anyone interested in exploring freelancing as a source of employment, including those who have started to dip their toes in or who’ve been practicing for some time and want to focus on developing their business. There are a number of elements to the programme as follows:

How to be a Freelancer

Thursday 9th March, 2pm-6pm, hybrid (online or in Work in Progress Studio)

This introductory session will be led by Matt Dowling from the Freelancer Club, a fantastic community platform providing invaluable resources for freelancers of all types, and cover the fundamentals including:

• What a freelance business is, what’s involved in becoming self-employed, how to price your services appropriately and how to develop your brand and market yourself effectively.
• What the realities of being a freelancer are, the challenges you are likely to face and how to manage these successfully to ensure you can manage your time, workload and motivation.

This session will be interactive with plenty of opportunities to ask specific questions, and to share and learn from the experiences of others. Even if you don’t decide to progress further with freelancing at this point, you’ll still take away an invaluable set of connections with other people with a similar mindset to you. For anyone who does which to explore further, you will then have the opportunity to sign up for a 1-2-1 diagnostic and planning meeting with Matt.

Food and refreshments will be provided for anyone attending the event in person in WIP. To secure your place, please complete the registration form here.

1-2-1 Consultations

These meetings will give anyone who wants to explore their own plans and ideas or their existing activities in more detail with Matt the chance to do so over the course of a 45 minute conversation to look at where you are now, where you’d like to be, and how you might get there.

Please note, the number of consultation slots available is limited so priority will be given to those who are actively looking to formally move into self-employment within the next few months. Anyone who meets this criterion but is not able to attend the introductory workshop should drop us a line directly via workinprogress@lancaster.ac.uk so we can try to secure you a slot.

Personalised support

The consultation meetings will enable us to identify areas of common or distinctive need and determine better what resources and interventions to put in place to meet these. Where eligible this may include some financial support from our partner Santander Universities to cover any basic start-up costs. Regardless of this, anyone who does register as self-employed or form a company following the consultations or who has done so within the last 12 months will be guaranteed access to a minimum of 12 hours of relevant professional support including free financial and legal advice before the end of June 2023.

Please bear in mind that due to changes in our funding model this year, we cannot currently confirm whether this opportunity will be made available again and so we strongly recommend anyone interested to take full advantage of this while it is available.