How Can Part-time Marketing Help the Modern Economy?

I recently wrote a blog in Huffington Post about how the self employed can support businesses through the economical challenges of the stormy Brexit waters. As a Part-time Marketing/Product Marketing Director, I see different styles in different companies. Those that are used to a 5 days a week, full-time employee. And the more agile ones, that understand they don’t need certain skills full time or all of the time. In my experience so far, it tends to be the smaller businesses that are more flexible in this way.

But part-time marketing skills can benefit all sorts of organisations and can help them remain agile in an uncertain economy. I have worked with a company that was looking for a full-time product marketing employee, but were struggling, so while they looked, they had me do their product marketing. It meant they didn’t need to rush and could make the right choice. There are also times, at product launches or during a campaign, when companies might need more skills and humans creating content, plans, training sales and so forth,  but just need it for a short time. This is where the self employed and part-time market can help out. Yes, their day rate will be higher than an average employee as they don’t get paid while they find companies to work with, nor do they get a pension and so forth. But the overall cost to a business is less, as you pick them up when you need them and frankly, drop them and don’t need to go through processes and reasons for needing to cut back. You don’t pay for their holidays, pensions, seat, technology and phone as we shoulder all of that cost.

Why do people take the risk of fulfilling this need for business? What is in it for us is diversity of industries and companies we work with, flexibility and work-life balance. We take the risk of not being permanent because there is a benefit to us, but at the same time, we provide immense flexibility to small and large businesses alike. And it is the businesses that can deal with the ups and downs in the economy, that survive.