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In these times, many managing directors proudly tell how they smoothly managed to send several thousand employees to their home office overnight – without any negative impact on business. On the contrary, some bosses admitted that their employees have suddenly become even more productive.
As a recent evaluation of the freelance portal freelance.de shows, this also has an impact on the work of the IT self-employed. Even before Corona, the clients had a hard time letting the freelancer work from their home office. As consulting firms and freelancers confirm, a day of home office work for the external consultants was usually the highest of the feelings that a customer got involved with. Because if he had to pay the high hourly rate, he wanted to have the self-employed with him “on his lap”. And lo and behold, from one day to the next everyone was at home and it was running. The analysis of the portal specializing in freelancers is clear: the number of projects with a remote component has increased by around 75 percent compared to the pre-corona period. And further: A few months ago, the proportion of projects with remote options made up 20 percent of all projects – meanwhile this percentage has almost doubled.
Stefan Oberdörfer, Chief Brand Officer (CBO) of freelance.de, is convinced that “Change the normal” and that the “old days” will not come back. The clients are pleased to note that the projects can also be processed professionally from home, which means that in future there will always be a decent share of remote work as a matter of course – and the trend is rising. With the consequence that the fees get in motion. Although Oberdörfer weighs down: “Performance is performance, no matter where it is performed”, but it is also correct that the travel and accommodation costs will be eliminated and the fee negotiations between personnel service provider and client or between personnel service provider and freelancer will certainly be “more intensive” in the future become.
The fact is that the hourly rates, according to another finding of the freelance.de evaluation, stagnate – at a high level. The general hourly rate across all IT professions (including project management) is 91 euros, which corresponds approximately to the pre-corona level. The downer for women: their hourly rate is around 80 euros. According to the freelance.de evaluation, the best way for the SAP experts to get through the crisis is that their hourly rate is declining in the single-digit percentage range and averages 90 euros. The IT security professionals take five euros less per hour, i.e. 85 euros, also with a slightly decreasing tendency. Only the developers are coming out of the crisis stronger at the moment: their hourly rate increases from 70 to 78 euros per hour.
A further confirmation of the development of fees is another survey, namely that of the skills most in demand. Here SAP know-how comes first, before Java knowledge, Abap and C ++ know-how. Programming languages dominate this ranking, because Javascipt, C # and Python also appear in the top ten. Before Corona, Cobol and Perl were among the most sought-after skills – that has now been done.