Opinion: Should you work for someone or become self-employed?

By Moses Baguma 

When starting your work life, you have a choice to make: become self employed or dedicate your skills to whoever will pay you the most for them. Neither choices comes with only benefits and no downside.

Once in the workplace, you will find so many challenges. The challenges of the employed are sometimes different from those who are self-employed but both workers have to find ways to overcome those challenges.

For example, it may seem that the challenges an employed person faces are less severe, in most cases. There is less risk. This, however, means that if a self-employed person has challenges and overcomes them, the financial benefits will be higher.

In self-employment, the rate of learning tends to also be higher. To survive the choppy waters of self employment, constant innovation is demanded.

In stark contrast, employment can become boring and routine.

In the end, those who sought survival lines through self-employment become more fit for survival and more productive because, overtime, they acquire a body of knowledge from which they pick insights to keep inventing new lucrative ideas.

Consequently, they become financially secure almost permanently -- being financially secure under employment means positioning yourself as someone who can be employed everywhere, a very hard thing to achieve because the nature of work usually doesn't task you to learn more, to become better qualified for multiple jobs.

The image used above in this story was sourced from: Micro Biz Mag