In this post you are going to discover the secret of becoming a successful contractor via the most direct path.

Yet before I get into that, let me talk briefly about the main currency of contracting in the UK. There are three forces at work. In order of importance they are: skills, experience and qualifications. These the three basic things that you need to align with a client's expectations in order to get a contract.

Let's take these in reverse order starting with qualifications.

Qualifications in IT are a joke. Having a degree can give you a competitive edge but it is by no means essential. It doesn't even seem to matter what subject your degree is in. I've worked with people with degrees in Metallurgy, Marine Biology and Music before. Then we have the so called professional qualifications. These are ridiculously trivial when compared to other professions.

You can pick up an in MCSE less than a month and a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect course can be done in 14 days. A Cisco Certified Network Professional certification will take you 2 weeks.

By comparison nurses have to train for 3 years and fire fighters train for 2 years before they pass their probationary period. Basic training to become a soldier takes around 6 months.

Therefore it is not surprising that IT qualifications are not taken very seriously by employers. If you have them, then it doesn't hurt, but they are pricey to obtain and they go out of date fast.

Never in all of my years working in IT have my qualifications been checked. If I had been less honest, I could have given myself a few more degrees and half a dozen made up certifications.

So what about experience?

Everything changes so fast in IT that anything more than 5 years experience tends to be mostly irrelevant, even in the same skill set. You might have been working with the same technology for 15 years, but the chances are you were using it totally differently five years ago.

Even touchy–feely management skills come in and out of fashion as quick as David Beckham's underpants. It's not really how much experience you have that counts, but having relevant experience.

Again, just like qualifications, your experience is never verified. People just don't have the time. If you sound convincing enough, then you would likely be taken a face value.

Lastly we come to your technical skills. Most skills being sought by clients can either be learned in hours or at most a few days. That's assuming of course that you have some basic levels of IT competence.

For more complex subjects, training courses can often teach you the subject in a week or two. If the skill is new to you, you can cram a lot on it before a contract and carry on with a reasonable degree of credibly. It is even possible to pass a technical test this way. You may even beat someone who actually has more knowledge and experience, if they have not brushed up before the test.

That of course is assuming you even have a technical test. These are rarer than you would expect, presumably due to the lack of time people have to set them up, let alone assess them. I have certainly come across contracts that you could completely blag. As long as you were able to hit the ground running, no one would even know. Even if you can't there's a chance that it would take months before they figure it out.

So in conclusion, none of the three sacred CV areas are actually much of a hurdle. The point is, the actual skills that you need to really make it in this game are never listed on your CV. It is surprising how few people realise this and they spend their entire career beefing up those three areas.

Instead the real power skills involve understanding the market, salesmanship and having a good strategy. If you want to survive in the world of contracting you need to understand how to work with people and deal with office politics. No one has yet created a diploma for those skills. You will need to look for other resources, such as the ones available on my site to help you there.