A Gig, is a Gig, is a Gig, or is it?

A lot has been written about the Gig Economy. Entertainers, musicians, actors comedians and a host of support roles in movie making and live entertainment venues have known the feast or famine lifestyles from temporary work assignments of "gigs" in these industries dating back to the 1920s. Many established independent contractors in healthcare, government agencies, aerospace, agriculture, tax preparation, IT and other industries have managed to survive the U.S. or global economic fluctuations and infections caused by outsourcing, trade imbalance or monetary policies during the last several decades. It wasn't until disruptive technologies began to be used to change/improve enterprise processes or fracture previously impenetrable dominate industries that temp workers or freelancing became more common and acceptable.

Employers who were early adopters of segmenting operational skills (necessary fulltime employees) from specialized skills (those talents only needed as necessary but less than fulltime) experimented with a revolving door of temporary specialized talent to meet enterprise goals. Temp firms flourished in attempts to fill the specialized talent needs. Soon after communication technology made possible remote (even global disbursement) participation in teams assembled for projects or for a limited time period. Employers could now quantify and analyze their talent needs as more tech tools were available to HR. Those firms who mastered this multi-dimensional HR chess game might expect to gain an edge in talent utilization to a competitive advantage. The results were more and better opportunities for freelancers and independents who held or secured the specialized talent in demand.

However, it wasn't until interactive jobs platforms using new smartphone applications in about 2007 burst onto the market that we began to see an organized interaction between non-employed workers and the buyer of "gig" services. Technology was being used to enable direct sourcing in ways far beyond the ad hoc, manual approaches of the time.

By 2017, technology-based direct sourcing models were no longer revolutionary in the on-demand, gig economy, which had been dominated and defined by end-user platforms like Uber, Lyft, Upwork, and Home Advisor. In fact, technology-based sourcing platforms have been the fundamental basis of the emergence of the on-demand, gig economy.

Here's how Andrew Karpie of Spend Matters Research pegs this phenomenon. "The online freelancer contingent workforce segment — now consisting of remote web designers, marketers, writers and others connected to work opportunities through online freelancer marketplaces like Upwork, Freelancer and PeoplePerHour, — has expanded rapidly over the years, driven in large part by SMB demand and, to a lesser degree, by individual users in larger businesses. It is only recently that these large enterprises, as larger scale buyers of the contingent workforce, have begun to grapple with how to leverage online freelancer and other similar platforms from which many different types of work and services can be procured."

Other factors driving the expansion of the Gig Economy are: 

• The pinch on labor (human) capital during the long great recession
• The peak of overseas outsourcing eliminating many jobs
• The explosion of technologies (robotics and AI) which enable task replacement by automation to a greater swath of industries.

How's this all worked out for gig opportunities? Well, a few years back, Krueger and Katz published an analysis of alternative work arrangements. "Their conclusion was that such arrangements (of which a minority are online platform gig work) had grown significantly between 2005 and 2015. Their estimate was its share of the US workforce had grown by a whopping 5 percentage points. (7-8 million workers.)"

Recently, Krueger and Katz concluded their estimates were too large, and the actual increase since 2005 is probably on the order of 1-2 percentage points (1-3 million workers). That aligns it more closely to other estimates, like those by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What's changed? "Most significantly, the effect of the business cycle," says Guy Berger Ph.D. and Chief Economist at LinkedIn. "The expansion of alternative work [gig work] seemed to be a response to the weak US labor market when job seekers didn't have many options. But now, with the labor market in a much healthier state, more conventional jobs have rebounded. The implication may be that we'll see these kinds of jobs proliferate again during the next downturn."

Current forecasts are that work processes which are conducted in part or in whole and completed by independents, temps or freelancers will grow from about 34% to 45% by 2030. While that means more "gig" opportunities, it also means more individuals working in the Gig Economy attempting to sustain income sufficient to support a family. In this environment doing Gig work is not just for work/life balance or pure independence anymore. It will be a competitive marketplace driven by technologies we have yet to develop in a global pool of "gigsters". Not like your daddy's gig at a local nightclub or replacing a wore out cooling fan in an old refrigerator or coding for the next generation of application extensions on Google Store or iTunes.

Stay tuned. Excitement ahead in the Gig Economy!!! 

The Gig Doctor