Working Patterns

Working patterns are the way in which someone works, whether they work in a team, on their own, part-time, full-time or free lance.

Shift Work is most popular in businesses or establishments that include 24 hour service. Guards and security personnel that are on a detail around the clock for a week couldn't physically do that. So shift work means that people can share the work load in a time efficient manner. If a guard was doing the evening shift they couldn't go all night, they would get tired and the quality of the work would suffer. Therefore another guard would relieve him after 8 hours and be fresh to work through the night which the first guard would not have been. To prevent a compromise to the quality of the constant task at hand the workload must be shared in this way.



Fixed Term contracts are work contracts that terminate at definite points. It could have a definite start and end point, like you would find in an internship. It could terminate automatically once a certain task has been completed, for example if you were brought in as a specialist during the making of a product, your contract would terminate once the product was finished. Or your work could terminate after a certain event, if you were working on the 2012 Olympics your contract would end when the Olympics event finished. 



Office Hours are called this for a reason, because it is the standard and stable hours that are used most often in an office environment. The colloquial term for office hours is nine-to-five, because they generally take place over a period of 8 hours roughly starting at 9am and ending at 5pm. They are also called office hours because those are the hours in the day that you work. You don't usually have excess projects to do on your own time unless you have fallen behind schedule and the job necessitates that if you cannot meet deadlines during office hours alone then you must complete the task in your own time not necessarily at your office.





Freelance work is where you are your own boss, and there are multiple pros and cons to this pattern of work. The main pros are that you don't answer to anyone (where the free in 'freelance' comes from), you set your own deadlines, there's somewhat less pressure and you get to keep all of the profit from what you've worked on. The basic cons are that you work irregular hours so it's difficult to plan ahead, it's usually hard to find work for yourself especially when you don't have a big company name backing you up, you need to provide everything for yourself, you can't obtain industry standard equipment easily and it's often difficult to keep yourself in line unless you thrive under those conditions. It really depends on the type of person you are whether or not you will gain better profit from going freelance than if you work for a company.




Hourly Rates are the amount of money that you will gain per hour of work that you do. If you work for a big company then you are usually given your hourly rates with the job description you're applying for. If you work as freelance then occasionally these don't exist, you could either charge the buyer for how many hours you worked on it or just for the piece of work as a whole. Hourly rates can change depending on when you are working, how qualified you are and how old you are. For example, someone could get more if they were working during the day than if they were working at night in a supermarket, because there are less customers to deal with at night and subsequently less work to do. If you're under 18 then the minimum wage is less than someone who is over 18, because under 18's don't pay taxes so the government decided that employers don't have to give them as much.