Contracting

The Advantages
* Paid by hour
* Not reliant on Line Manager for promotion
* Different work (usualkly new projects)
* Politics
* Variety of Work (within skill set)
* Travel

The Disadvantages
* Outcast
* Tax
* Lack of Job Security
Skills Development
There are very few sites thast will be keen to train a contractor in any new skill. There are a few reasons for this - the main one beign that thwey pay you good money for yuor existign skills - those skills are why you are contracting. Secondly, permanent staff get edgy when they see a contractor getting trainied in anything. They start thinking "Why should I stay on as a permanent when contraftoes get trained anyway ?". A fair point.

There is however a way to get around trhis if you are good at what yuo do.

Negotiating Contracts

My Motivation
In my third year of I.T. I joined an Oracle project in a company thast had very few Oracle developers. It was back in the 80s and skilled Oracle people were still rare. So we had to employ contractors. One company providing such peolpe was known as Sequel and they had sent us a few programmers to help us develop our nwe system.