Generalist vs Specialist & the GIG Economy

According to Global Velocity, in the USA there are 59 million workers in the freelance or gig economy, earning over 500 million, with an estimated 50% of American workers completing at least one external independent contracting assignment this year. While grounded in the transportation industry, the emergence of consultants, IT, AI curators and a host of independent contractors in professional industries - trades, healthcare expanding, there is a significant shift underway in the global workforce. 

Most entrepreneurs, 70% in recent surveys, do so by choice, not socio-economic need, mainly grounded in a desire to reap the full rewards of their work, to set their own work-life balance and to carve an independent piece from the global pie. In essence, the model of working for a company, generating wealth for the stock holders is now a short term learning evolution, vice a formative career. Individuals are entering the corporate workforce to learn the industry and quickly departing on collective or independent ventures, leading to a host of online offerings that once were the purview of corporations. This is the emerging economic model.

You can hire an MBA graduate, equivalent to western schools, for $10 per hour from India, or a marketing expert with a masters degree from Thailand for $15 a day. Why would you hire a recent graduate from Harvard or Yale on a full time salary with expensive benefits when you can outsource a specific niche requirement to an expert with equivalent skills for a fraction of the cost? Additional risk, potentially, but is that risk equivalent to the savings of contract work?

These chaotic times, the levels of uncertainty in the markets and fears of recessions, are pushing the workforce to embrace responsibility for their outcomes. While there remains calls for action to counter this movement to the gig economy, often in posts from individuals who are following a 1999 idea of sending in resumes and expecting to land interviews, eventually they understand that the system is not failing them, they’re just pursuing a strategy for a different economy. While in some industries there remains growth in salaried employment, that is becoming an exception outside public sector positions. In some western locations, precarious work is the fastest growing part of the economy.