"Open doors for yourself; they won't open for you" – Billie Bond.
One of our last lectures was presented by Wendy Mason, who focused on self-employment. This lecture was beneficial as it gave me a lot of information and guidance about potential freelancing in the future. Wendy runs her own business selling handmade jewellery and is the National Director of AA2A.
Wendy described self-employment as "A career but a lifestyle option", explaining how it allows you the freedom to create what you love and allow work to become a lifestyle decided by yourself. She explained how over 40% of graduates are self-employed within 10 years. Wendy gave information about tax-paying within self-employment and starting up prices. She explained the differences between a self-employed and limited company and provided her personal tips for working from home.
These were things that I had never even considered until this lecture, so I am glad I attended this lecture. It was filled with new and essential information that I should consider shortly, especially with me considering doing freelance work to gain more experience as a creative practitioner.
We were given a few valuable tips about private workspaces and the potential of business rates that wouldn't have occurred to me. The same applies to the cost you can legitimately claim as expenses. Taxes are still a bit scary to me; however, this talk eased my mind and allowed me to understand how to do it. She said that a good accountant might be helpful to know about those little less obvious tax savings one wouldn't generally think about.
Wendy also explained the AA2A scheme, which gives you an incentive to carry on working. I will most definitely look into the resources she provided for us, as it will definitely be helpful to have once I have finished my degree. This part of the talk made self-employment seem less scary and seeing the accurate stats and figures helped a lot.
Anyway, this talk was encouraging and was an excellent introduction to self-employment, which has demystified this a lot for me. Thus making it a much more realistic option for me once I get to the end of my undergraduate study and start making some profit more from my commission-based work or other freelance work I could do in the future.
I wish there were more such relevant talks and workshops like this offered by the university. Maybe there are, but we don't hear about them, or we are so wrapped up in the making process that this offer doesn't register on our radars. Probably, we just have to be more proactive at finding out about this stuff. I guess that is the essence of being self-employed: you have to do things for yourself to make it happen.
Since the second year, I have been more involved in the Venture program and attended a couple of lectures about freelancing to understand how it works when I finish my degree. With this new knowledge, I feel more prepared to face "the big world." primarily as a freelance artist to start my creative journey.
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