A salaried job in India is safe in some ways: the money lands on the same date every month, and your employer handles the tax. But a salary cannot protect you from a decision made far above your manager, and it tells you nothing about whether you could earn without it. For me, real job security is knowing you can earn from your skills again, in more than one way, if the job goes. You can find that out while your salary is still coming in, by getting paid once by a stranger for work you did on your own.
How a salaried job looks from home
When I was thinking about leaving my job, the question in my head was the one people around me asked: "Did you settle?" In most Indian families, being settled means a stable job with a stable income, at a company whose name means something at a family function. I spent seven years in corporate jobs, and for years the only thing relatives wanted to know about my work was what it paid. Nobody asked whether I was learning anything.
12,200
A manager's job at India's largest IT services company (opens in a new tab) is what most families picture when they say "settled". Once relatives learned that I was earning in dollars from clients in the US, the questions about my stability stopped. My work had become less certain, with no provident fund, no HR department and any client free to leave, and still nobody asked again. Log kya kahenge: what to tell family about freelancing is about that side of it.
Real security is being able to earn again
I think of job security as the ability to earn again: if your salary stopped, could you make money come from somewhere else? A senior product manager who had just been let go by a large US tech company called me not long ago, facing exactly that question. He had spent more than ten years at large software companies. He wanted to move into go-to-market engineering, and his plan was a course of a month or two and then another full-time job as fast as possible.
He's scared of unpredictability, and he doesn't know what route to go. He built his career in software development and project management, obviously thinking that that is a good life. And now the future is all blurry.
He had done everything a family would ask, and he had never needed to earn anywhere except inside a large company. From what I follow of AI researchers and scientists, the message is that deep expertise in one narrow field is no longer the protection it used to be, and that what counts is how you adapt to change. In the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 (opens in a new tab), employers estimate how fast skills are changing.
39%
My own security came from a string of changes that looked random at the time. Early on, most of them happened because a client needed a skill I did not have yet, and learning it excited me.
First, I worked as a logo designer, and then I got into website development, and then a little bit of accounting, and then I got into go-to-market engineering. From outside, this might look like jack of all trades and master of none. But internally, I know that even if I lose all my clients right now, I can learn a completely new skill and start my own thing in about two to three months. I've gone through ups and downs of financial stability multiple times, so if I lose all my income today, it does not worry me.
| A salary protects you from | A salary does not protect you from |
|---|---|
| A slow month, because the money arrives anyway | A restructuring decided in another country |
| Finding your own clients | Your skills slowly going out of date |
| Sending invoices and chasing payments | Needing new income quickly if the job ends |
What to do while the salary keeps coming
You do not need to resign to find out how exposed you are. Three moves answer the question, and all of them fit around a full-time job.
Ask who would pay you if your role disappeared next month. Answer it on paper. If your honest answer is "I don't know", you are where that product manager was when he called me.
Make one small piece of real work on your own. Do it for an imaginary client, and make it good enough to show a real one.
Get paid once by someone who owes you nothing. A favour for a friend or free work for your portfolio does not count. Do it while your salary still covers the EMIs, so nothing is at risk. Freelancing while working full time in India: a safe plan shows how to fit it around your job.
That first payment will not end the fear on its own. Mine was $45 (about ₹4,300 at today's rate3), and afterwards I was still unsure freelancing would work. Small projects followed, $100 from one client and $150 or $300 from another, and the fear wore down slowly as the payments kept coming. The moment it finally broke was about price, and I tell it in How to raise your rates as a freelancer. It took me eight years to go from $5 an hour to $150 an hour, and those are my own figures, honest as of September 2026. If you want the whole path in order, the plan for thinking about freelancing lays it out.
Your first paid test, in three steps
- Pick one piece of work from your job that someone outside your company would pay for. For example, a report you build every month, a process you automated, or a design you are known for.
- Make one small sample of it on your own time, good enough to show a real client.
- Set a price and offer it to one stranger. The rate calculator turns your salary into the hourly rate you need, and How to charge international clients from India explains how to quote it.
By Sunday evening, write down one line: the work you would sell, and the kind of person who would buy it. Then find three job posts from the last month that ask for that work, and write down the date you send your first offer.
Sources
- 1Reuters, TCS to cut 2% of its workforce (via Yahoo Finance), 27 July 2025 (opens in a new tab)Checked 27 Sep 2026
- 2World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025 (opens in a new tab)Checked 27 Sep 2026
- 3Federal Reserve, H.10 exchange rates for the Indian rupee (₹95.87 per dollar on 18 Sep 2026) (opens in a new tab)Checked 27 Sep 2026