Why Should Anyone Consider It At All?
Most workers have turned to the gig economy as a way to work with more flexible hours or supplement their income from another job.
It is also a stop-gap income generating measure while in-between jobs or in the unfortunate situation that a person has got retrenched from full time employment.
A gig economy is a free market system in which temporary positions are common and organizations contract with independent workers for short-term engagements. The trend toward a gig economy has begun. A study by Intuit predicted that by 2020, 40 percent of American workers would be independent contractors.
Another form of gig economy work is microtasking, or taking on small tasks that cannot yet be automated and are distributed over the internet to many workers. Some of the platforms that offer this work include Amazon Mechanical Turk, VirtualEmployee, Clickworker, Upwork and Guru.
While technology has enabled new ways of making money through the gig economy, it hasn’t yet created the kind of gig jobs that can sustain life for the worker i.e not able to make ends meet.
The gig economy is going strong, and millennials are leading the way: Self-employment in the United States could triple to 42 million workers by 2020, and 42 percent of those people are likely to be millennials.
Let name the protagonist of this millennial generation as R.man. R-man needs to know how not only to survive but also thrive in this gig economy.
R.man has read in the net, about current employment trends and opportunities, namely
- The weakness of investment in the post-crisis period and exhaustion of opportunities for the unbundling of global supply chains in goods had resulted in “reshoring” of some supply chains as the cost advantages of producing in emerging countries decline. These will result in less jobs in the employment landscape, especially in less developed countries.
- News of emerging technologies such as automation, “globotics” – an ugly neologismn that describes the integration of artificial intelligence and robotics, and other computer innovations are changing the fundamental nature of work. This is about to do to many services what the old information revolution did to manufacturing: facilitate offshoring and destroy enormous numbers of jobs. Millennials and young adults are the most affected generation in this sea-change in job landscape.
Take the following:
- Autonomous electric cars: In 2018, the first self-driving cars are tested on the roads. In a few years time, the entire car manufacturing and service industries will be disrupted just like the taxi industry being decimated by the appearance of Uber and other companies providing smartphone app which provides on-demand service to users.
- Health Care, diagnostics tools and medicine services: Jobs that are currently being handled by human specialists could be one day handled by autonomous machines and robots. Take for example, the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize 2017 Winner, The DxtER which is designed to resemble the diagnostic tool from Star Trek. It works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample and your breath and then identify 34 illnesses, including diabetes, atrial fibrillation, and pneumonia, using a suite of Bluetooth sensors connected to a tablet, using AI technologies. Diagnostic tasks and collaborative work could be carried at a distance, principally as a result of improvements in virtual reality.
- Future work in task-based gig economy will be done by some people, let’s call them Ubereans, working for a variety of platforms, enjoying the benefits of life as independent contractors.
R.man knows that he has to take responsibility of owning his own career progression and work-life balance (as no government or any employer will do it for him).
R.man has to keep moving ahead and keep learning just to keep up with the rapid changes in the business world, if he want to survive and thrive in the new-millennium workplace, even to the extent, to change job often or doing gig job, to keep pace.
R.man, like most working people and job-seekers has worry of being looked at, as “job hopper”. He is afraid that potential employers may dislike his many short term jobs in his resume and bundled them off. Nevertheless, he need to face his fear and work on his long term goals instead.
R.man prefers to work in “fast” organization. Such company understands that the energy inside an organization is the whole ballgame i.e that every business idea is powered by the team’s energy to fulfill the mission. This suits his personality traits. He is more emotionally agile and hardworking. He is willing to break the rules than his counterparts in the traditional full-time workforce. He is more likely to rate himself as dependable, self-disciplined, extroverted, enthusiastic, and open to new experiences. In a nutshell, his traits may help explain the appeal of entrepreneurial work to him.
R.man also know that he has to build his own capability and marketability in the gig economy. He need to carry it around with you. If a given job disappears, he’ll be fine as he could get another job pretty soon. He knows that his talents and skills are valued by other companies as he could solve their business pains.
R.man knows that every time he changes jobs, he get to (and has to) re-establish his value to the organization he is going to work for. His expertise can only be valuable and grow if he could grab every new learning opportunity in any organization he worked for i.e continue improvement in knowledge, skills and expertise in area he is interested in. He recognizes the importance of growth mindset. The more companies he work for, the more his reputation in his business community can grow. The more comfortable he will be walking into new business situations and figuring out what’s important. Nothing but experience can help him grow those muscles!
R.man can do it so can you!
