In Australia, you generally get paid more as a temp than you do as a full-time employee, which seems to be different to the experience of most people here. Looks like this is a major YMMV topic.
I was a ‘career temp’ for about six or seven years before my current job - which I ended up applying for when it was advertised, because I really like the boss, the hours and the environment and figured the minor hourly pay cut was probably worth it in order to have a permanent part-time position that suited me.
My standard Temp assignments were as a personal assistant, but I’ve also done stints as a website creator and administrator, criminal registry clerk and data entry person, and all sorts of general clerical stuff. I’m as happy to do a ‘serious’ job as I am a week of photocopying - and 9 times out of 10, the photocopying job that other temps turned down because they were looking down their noses at it let me develop a relationship with a company that would later ask for me by name when they had an administration position come up. (And I figured that since I get paid ASO2 rates - plus Temping penalties - regardless of whether they had me doing work I had to think about or feeding paper into a copier machine, I not only wasn’t too proud to do the ‘photocopy this stuff for a week’ assignments, I quite liked them as a nice relaxing break between serious jobs.)
Before my last assignment, I resigned from probably about seven or eight assignments because I found out I’d been hired with the intent of temp-to-perm when I’d only wanted a temporary assignment. It’s fairly popular over here to fill a position with a temp in a kind of ‘test-drive’ capacity, so you can try-before-you-buy and see if the person fits into your company without having to put up with all that pesky interview time and so forth.
Which is *great *if what you, as the Temp, really want is a permanent position - but lousy if you actually *like *the whole ‘temp’ experience and enjoy going from place to place every 3-6 months, learning new skills and seeing new environments. Then you feel like crap because you find the company has come to rely on you and they think they’re doing you a favour by inviting you to go permanent, but you have to knock them back (and put them back to square 1 employee-wise, because now they have to train another temp) since permanent employment isn’t what you’re after.
As time went by and assignment after assignment kept trying to get me to hire on as a permanent employee, I felt less guilty and more irritated, since I really think this false advertising thing benefits no-one whatsoever. I took to making a point in conversation of how much I loved temping and you couldn’t shift me out of it with dynamite… but it didn’t really help a lot, since most employers figured maybe I’d make an exception for them. :rolleyes:
I don’t know how much this helps you, or how relevant it is outside of Australia, but in my experience at least the best way to get your choice of jobs is to do temping. You get the opportunity to see the company honestly before you commit to it, and plus people are generally so happy to have someone in helping them that you feel like you’re really making a difference. And here, at least, it’s a great way to get paid better for doing the same work - and most of the long-term contract positions (3 months or more) are planning to make the position permanent unless it’s specified as part of a temporary project.
