My introduction

Hello, I am Sunchai Kongtangjitt from the land of smiles! I was a person who at the age of 17 left my home country, Thailand, to challenge the world stage. As of today, I have lived overseas in Japan, Australia, and Malaysia for a total of 11 years. Moreover, either for work or for private reasons I jumped around to over 30 countries like a nomadic bird.

The road to a global network

My hometown is Bangkok near the old airport. When I was a child, I saw airplanes every day and I thought to myself “someday I want to travel overseas”. Happily, soon after I graduated high school, I was awarded a scholarship to study at a Japanese university. That was a huge life changing episode in my life.

In Japan I was living on my own for the first time in my life and, of course, living in a new and different culture with different customs which all had a big impact on my growth as a person. I began to meet many new people, and this began to have a large impact on my view of the world.

After 7 years of my life in Japan I wanted to connect with people from many more nationalities, so I moved to the multinational city of Sydney, Australia. Through various jobs I was able to create a large network of friends from many regions that made me think that “I have friends from everywhere!”. After that I moved to a fourth country, Malaysia. I began working as a cabin attendant for an international airline. I discovered Workshift during one of my days off from my job as a flight attendant.

Writer and flight attendant

The first job I got on Workshift was to write articles about travel in Japan. For someone like me who has traveled a lot in Japan, it was so much fun to re-live those stories and share them with other people. I found Workshift while I was searching for any jobs for writers on the internet so I did a search and found a job that was seeking a native Thai person who could write about traveling in Japan! I didn’t hesitate and immediately applied for the job.

As I wrote about my experiences traveling in Japan, I felt nostalgic remembering those times when I lived in Japan and I felt that I was back in Japan living those happy moments again. I have already finished writing 20 articles and I plan to continue writing more. Moreover, I received a lot of other work such as translation and market research related jobs.

As an airline passenger attendant, I would fly to many destinations and at each location after doing some site seeing, there would always be plenty of idle time to spend at a café where I could do my writing for Workshift travel articles. For example, if I am in Australia I go somewhere near the sea, or go to a nearby park, drink some delicious coffee and write travel articles while I enjoy the scenery. It is really quite terrific! I have to say that being able to be productive during idle time is certainly a big merit of being a freelancer.

Freelancing and Workshift

Actually, since my university life I have been doing interpretation and translation work using Thai, Japanese and English but the work volume was always limited and as a result payment was problematic. However, the Workshift platform provides a number of different kinds of jobs. Sometimes you can be selected for a job that you don’t have experience in! Moreover, the Workshift system requires the client to pay Workshift in advance before the final hiring process is completed, therefore payment for your work is already held by Workshift at the time you are hired so you need not worry about not being paid by the client at the end of the job. You know that you will be paid when you deliver your work to the client, because it has already been paid to Workshift before you started the job.

It might be hard to imagine a job where the only thing you need to have is a PC, and you can do it from anywhere, but Workshift has designed a way to do this! Payment is also very easy. If I compare and rank all the freelance jobs I have worked with, Workshift is the easiest system to work with. If there are any issues that you confront while working on Workshift, the support team is very helpful. If you want to try working as a freelancer I definitely recommend using Workshift.

COVID 19 and Freelancers

As you know, the world airline industry has taken a big hit from the spread of COVID 19. Since March the airline industry has completely stopped operations and I was stuck at home in Malaysia. There were not any flights until today and of course that means I have no salary. The entire industry is in trouble along with all the people who work in the industry.

Fortunately, I was saved by Workshift! I was prohibited from going outside during the lockdown due to Covid 19, but I was doing online work for the entire time. I am so grateful to Workshift! I am so glad that I found it and started working with Workshift early in the pandemic. My personal opinion is that in the future more and more jobs will be online so it is important for me to have this foundation of online work experience behind me because it might be hard to make a living in the future from regular jobs.

Advice to those of you who are undecided

For those of you who are either bored with regular jobs, you want to become free from your current job, or maybe you have lost your job due to Covid 19, I am calling on all of you!

Please consider freelance work! The value of freelance work is good even as just a side job. As a rich person once said, “If you don’t have at least two sources of income and something suddenly happens, your dead!” I agree with that. Life is not only about working, so while you work, find a place that you like and live your unique life as fully as you can.