Excuse the exaggeration on the title… Now that you are here lets talk about the “future of work” from where it is and where it seems to be heading from the perspective of a mostly clueless but observant teenager (myself).
Though I may have just said that the title “Death to traditional jobs as we know them?” was a bit of an exaggeration, that does not change my stance on the future of freelancing being extremely huge due to a younger more accepting Gen Z crowd as well as the effects of a global pandemic.
About 58% of non-freelancers surveyed who were new to remote work due to the pandemic claimed to be considering freelancing in the future. Also, according to Upwork’s study from the summer 2020 “Freelance Forward” which surveyed over 6,000 workers in the US over the age of 18 found that 59 million Americans performed freelance work in the previous 12 months, representing 36% of the U.S. workforce, an increase of 2 million freelancers since 2019 and By the year 2027, freelancers are projected to make up the majority of the workforce in the United States, with 50.9% of the working population.
Now back to the point I tried to make about a “younger more accepting Gen Z crowd” and what this audience has contributed to freelancing as a whole. I strongly feel like the reason younger people are open to freelancing is because the attractiveness that flexiblity gives as well as exposure to more opportunities online and the ability to use the internet to pick up new skills and immediately put them to use. This has been very helpful amidst of a tough job market during the pandemic for recent college graduates, half of the Gen Z workforce (age 18–22) have freelanced in the past year, and of those, more than a third (36%) started since the onset of Covid-19 according to that same Upwork study. Interestingly enough Kronos Inc also put out a survey and found that while 53% of the Gen Z respondents expressed interest in working for themselves, 47% said they were unwilling to sacrifice the stability of a traditional “9 to 5 job”
Though I don’t think this is a wrap for jobs as we know them especially because of that 47% that expressed an unwillingness to sacrifice the stability traditional jobs offer. More and more people over the next few years are going to take that leap and Freelancing as a whole is going to be huge. However to get to that point it is going to take a lot of development in current services ranging from payment acceptance softwares to tax assistance and expense tracking software so that it is less stressful to begin freelancing for your everyday worker.