Mark Hendrickson on Techcrunch’s Will the Credit Crunch Inflate the Internet Bubble? notes a survey of over 800 mortgage and real estate professionals (presumably in danger of, or recently having lost their jobs in the subprime blow up and credit crunch), found that 56% intend to start a business and 14% had already started.

While the rest of the article poses the question of whether these “techno outsiders” are really welcome or needed doing tech start-ups (the survey also found 43% were looking at the tech sector for their start-up), it leaves us to ponder the larger issue of hard times having a recipricol effect on self-employment numbers.

I remember during the early 90’s recession (not that I even realized there was a recession on at the time), that there were more than usual television commercials targetting the entrepreneur segment. I remember some of them angered me deeply as I was for the most part an out of work college graduate. But the mechanism was unmistakable and I seemed to know it on an intuitive level.

The shift to self-employment was not a conscious decision to become an entrepreneur as much as it was a necessary mental shift I had to make in order to think outside the box and differentiate myself from everybody else in the same boat as myself.

I wasn’t an out-of-work computer programming graduate handing out resumes. Those went into the garbage after a few futile months of job searching. In their place, I printed up some cheap business cards with the words “M Factor Consulting” on them and *presto*, I was a consultant instead. That seemed to work at least marginally better than the former, even if it was a placebo effect in my own mind. I landed more one-off jobs and managed to string them together into something resembling a fledgling career.

With a recession all but officially here (even the talking heads on TeeVee agree that a recession is a near certainty in the US in 2008 and with Canada typically lagging 10 to 12 months we’ll certainly feel the effects here), self-employment in some shape or form will likely surge.

Mark Jeftovic has been a self-employed internet professional since 1994, currently he is the founder and president of easyDNS Technologies Inc., the DNS hosting company and domain registrar. His personal blog is at http://mark.jeftovic.net