Alister Shirazi's ultimate career goal is to never have to work for anyone ever again. And he believes the technical skills he learns from his contract work will get him there.
Shirazi, 34, currently works as a project manager in an independent contractor role for a tech company. Though it means he has a boss for now, he sees it as a way to learn new skills and add some big names to his resume, which makes him more competitive in the industry.
Right now he earns $60 per hour for a 40-hour workweek as part of 12-month contract; that comes out to just shy of $125,000 per year.
Here's why Shirazi views contract work as an investment in his long-term career goals.
Getting into project management
Shirazi studied economics in college, earned an MBA and launched iPhone repair businesses in California and Brazil, where he spent time after business school. After a few years, he sold his businesses to move back to the states and build up his savings. He took a business operations job with a start-up in the Bay Area with an $80,000 starting salary, "which I thought was great, but is actually not enough after taxes to make it work."
He got interested in coding after he was assigned a menial task he really didn't want to do: "I automated it using Python programming and didn't tell anybody," Shirazi says. "Eventually I told my boss and asked for something else to work>Landing a job in 4 days
Once Shirazi had more technical skills and project management experience>'Anybody could do this'
Shirazi says he's open about his salary as someone who broke into tech "because I want people to know that anybody can do this."
Being a good project manager means being a generalist in a lot of ways, Shirazi says. Most importantly, "you have to be resourceful, a critical thinker, a planner and a good communicator."
