I feel as if my career has reached a plateaux.
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Power-Coder did you use sites such as Elance to obtain side jobs while still working full time?
Contracting can make you more interesting for an employer later on, since any good contractor could be a good consultant. It will also give you some time to work on many different projects with many differing people, and thereby grow as a professional.
There are many upsides to working on a contract, especially if you are a driven person who loves to work hard. If you succeed in what you do, you can even work 4-day weeks for 5-day pay.
But the first period can be very hard. Since you don't yet have any regular customers, you might go several weeks without pay. Don't start contracting without a nest egg ;)
I have been "contracting" for a consultant centered employer for a couple of years, where I get all the fun of it, but on a salary. Jumping from project to project and learning a lot. But still, I would not recommend it for anyone who is not secure in the fact that they are desirable to the market. You are essentially a consultant, salesman and product when you're contracting.
I highly recommend Gerald Weinberg as a reference here.
http://secretsofconsulting.blogspot.com/
he literally "wrote the book" on this topic, particularly Secrets of Consulting and More Secrets of Consulting
I just started down this road about 4 months ago. I'm still at my full-time day job for the salary, but the consulting/contract side is definitely building up and is helping me pay off my upcoming wedding and honeymoon!
If you can manage it with your current job, I would definitely recommend starting it out as a side business to make sure it will work for you.
Good luck!
I've been a contractor in the UK for fourteen years now, I'd reached a kind of barrier where to earn any more money I'd have to become some kind of manager, going contracting enabled me to earn significantly more and stay in very technical, hands-on kind of roles.
The advantages are: money, freedom (you can watch the internal politics and enjoy them as a spectator), the chance to work with a lot of different people and in different companies, enabling you to pick up all kinds of skills. Chances are you'll find exceptional people you can learn from most plaes you go, and opportunities for mentoring others as well.
The disadvantages are: you can be out of work for a few weeks or months when your contract ends, depending on where you live and the kind of skills you have, this is especially true if you will be relying on agencies to provide you with work. Theoretically you'll have less job security than permanent employees, though you'll be a lot more experienced at interviewing for jobs. You'll have to get used to training yourself in new technologies and it can be hard to transition between technologies (I made a leap from mainframe C to C# by taking what was quite a low paid contract, purely for the experience)
If you go full time you've got to provide your own retirement fund, it can be hard work getting a mortgage (this is probably especially true now, you'd be seen as far too risky) and basically you have to make all your own financial arrangements. You'll also have additional expenses such as legal and accounting bills to pay.
(also bear in mind in the UK, the government and IR have been at war with contractors since 1999, google something called IR35, in a nutshell the government position is that most contractors aren't self employed at all, but employees of their clients and as such should pay employment taxes on the majority of their profit, obviosly contractors tend not to agree with this assessment. A group was setup in 1999, the Professional Contractor Group, to oppose the new regulations. You can find their site at www.pcg.org.uk, well worth joining if you do become a contractor)
I consider there to be three options:
As a freelancer the pay can be much more lucrative, but that means you are doing all of the work: sales, invoicing, client-relationship management and, of course, programming.
As a consultant for companies like IBM and Fujitsu, you would be placed at the client site and work as part of their team. You're expected to be fast, smart and get the job done. You may be tasked to do maintenance work while staff developers work on new projects.
In a company that does project work, you typically work from the company's office but do work for other clients. The benefits are that you work with the same smart programmers every day and can bounce ideas off each other while still having the advantage of moving to different projects and clients every few months. Typically, this is also new development work since it's packaged as a project.
One aspect that is not often mentioned in these discussions is that it requires a certain type of person. Many folks have the technical skills to perform the billable part of the job, far less also have the skills / persona to excel at being independent. Being a contractor is very much entrepreneurial. Independence requires a certain level of leadership and decision making. Even if you fall under the management of, say, a PM or Systems Architect, you still need these skills. Trust me. Whether that means selling yourself or asserting your expertise (and the very reason why you add value to a client), you'll find these skills integral to being a successful consultant.
Being a consultant is a real challenge, both in good and bad ways.
I'm currently working as a junior developer at a medium-sized consultant agency (100 consultants or so) and I'm having a great time. Still, while working as a consultant at a client, there's little room for not being clueless. You can't really go around asking about technical things you're unsure of, because you're being paid a lot of money to know it already! It's super important to have a good business sense as well, technical skills alone won't cut it. Try to identify your clients' business models, what earns them money, what are the core problems in their particular field of business, etc. This will make you a valuable asset, and fast. Good luck!