When you start your career, there are a lot of options you can take and these options are classified into two routes: getting employed or becoming the employer. Both options will grow your career and bring you to great heights, but self-employment usually clamour loudly in terms of prestige and power.

A self-employed status comes with its own set of pros and cons. Here is a discussion of both aspects of such status:

Pros

1. Better income. In an employee status, you are receiving only a portion of what the company earns. Even when you succeed at landing a high position, you will take in only a part of what you actually deserve. As a self-employed individual, you will take home all of the earnings. If you land a good project, the full amount will be yours to take.
2. Power. As the employer and owner of the company, you have all the power. You are not answering to superior, except for your own clients. You call the shots. No one is going to limit you in any way so you can exercise full sovereignty.
3. Flexibility of hours. As a self-employed individual, you run your own clock. You are not clocking-in for a company so you can take rest days or vacations, as you please. Your work hours are more flexible—usually determined by presence of projects, deadlines and so forth.

Cons

1. Instability. There is much instability in terms of income when you are self-employed because the business’ earnings will fluctuate greatly. It may be good one day and it will be bad on the other, there is no way to guarantee it. It is unstable because being in business is risky, so you always have to have money, put away.
2. Big responsibility. Power is amazingly addictive but when you are self-employed, the responsibility you hold is going to be big, it could be inundating. If you have people working for you, you will be responsible for them and you will oversee every aspect of the business.

Self-employment puts you as the boss who holds the power over your career. You are not under the supervision and control of a boss but you hold the sole responsibility over your progress, but it also comes with a collection of disadvantages—cons that you have to be prepared to overcome.