Advantages of Contract Engineering During Economic Downturns

There are certain advantages of contract engineering that you need to consider. In this brief guide, we will discuss a few.

Excluding a handful of centenarians who were alive during the 1918 Spanish Flu, most of us have never experienced anything like the current Covid-19 situation we are facing. Even those who were alive in 1918 would have been too young to form lasting memories, so it’s fair to say that we are in uncharted waters here.

I hope everyone is doing well, considering the circumstances. There are a lot of unknowns right now, but our frontline healthcare workers are doing an amazing job and we will hopefully get ahead of this thing sooner rather than later.

Regardless of what happens on the medical front, it looks like we are heading towards a significant economic downturn both here in the United States and globally. This is, obviously, not great news for business owners (or anyone, really), but we can minimize the impact to our bottom line by making cost-effective business decisions.

Unlike the pandemic, most of us have seen what a recession looks like, and we can use 2008 as a blueprint for the decisions we make today.

Following the 2008 recession, there has been a significant movement towards contract-based work, and engineering is no different. Here are some Employer Advantages of Hiring Contract Engineers.

The recession taught employers some very important lessons about long-term planning and business continuity but laid-off employees learned a thing or two as well. Skilled engineers that had devoted years to a company found themselves jobless through no fault of their own and became understandably disillusioned with the promises of long-term job security.

This created an influx of skilled engineers willing to take on short-term contract work. This method of project-based hiring is also advantageous to small employers, as it makes it easier to secure talented engineers on a short-term basis without long-term commitments.

Over the coming months, the unfortunate reality is that there are going to be businesses that go under and skilled engineers that find themselves laid off.

This will (briefly) create a window where the supply of engineers might be greater than the demand. On top of that, there will be experienced engineers that might be reluctant to jump back into a long-term commitment and will be looking for short-term work while they figure out their next steps.

In other words, it is about to become easier and more cost-effective to source quality contract engineers that were previously unavailable. In the meantime, stay safe out there and remember to wash your hands.