«Graduates and online freelancing» — a radio episode of Youth Participate

Palestinian youth raise the topic of “Graduates and online freelancing” within the programme “Youth Participates”, one of the activities of the project “Strengthening the democratic participation of Palestinian youth”, implemented by Pal-Think for Strategic Studies and funded by the government of Canada. Under this title, Abdullah Abu Shamala and Mai al-Sous devoted themselves to preparing their research paper within their participation in the project.

Abu Shamala began by reviewing the paper's principal axes: the concept of online freelancing; graduates and online freelancing; freelancing and Palestinian youth; and the spread of the freelancing culture among youth.

The episode presented an opinion survey prepared by the working team, which asked Palestinian youth whether they had worked online and whether the experience was individual or through a work incubator. The answers varied: some had worked and earned money; some tried to work but were subjected to fraud and swindling; some worked but preferred traditional job opportunities — alongside varying views on the competence of what the business incubators offer.

The episode's guest — the proofreader and translator Heba al-Hayek — spoke of her experience in online freelancing and how she joined an intensive training programme held by one of the civil-society institutions working in Palestine after going through the experience of online freelancing, which provided her work and jobs and honed her professional skills and her freelancing across the most widespread work platforms.

She noted that young people in freelancing divide into those working from home and those working within a team, institution, or company — adding that these opportunities free young people from the constraint of searching for office work and open new horizons for fighting unemployment and curbing its spread.

Al-Sous spoke of how far Palestinian youth and society as a whole know online freelancing and how far they trust it as a genuine work opportunity sparing them the long unemployment queues, explaining that youth uptake of it is in continuous increase.

Abu Shamala also spoke of the freelancing incubators in the Gaza Strip and the services, consultations, and varied incentives they offer young people wishing to engage in online freelancing — speaking of how they work and the difference between them and what civil-society institutions and certain private freelancing companies offer.

The guests discussed the fields of work, the importance of specialisation in freelancing, the necessity of working on the electronic marketing of oneself and of the work one offers clients, in addition to the importance of mastering the audience's language and seizing the best times to submit the most suitable work offers on the different work platforms.