This piece was originally written on October 30, 2018 for an internship. This post is a revised version.
The Name of the Game: The #GigEconomy
Statistics Canada studied trends in Canada’s labour market during the first six months of 2018 in a report they released in August. In their report, they found that unemployed individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher found it challenging to find work matching their skill level.
As a millennial with a bachelor’s degree, I can relate to the difficulty in searching for paid full-time work. I graduated with a specialization in audiovisual journalism. With that background, I could also apply to other media-related or writing jobs. Scrolling through online job postings, I found that I fit the profile of a potential candidate that employers were looking for. There was only one thing that I felt I lacked that landed me in the “No” pile of applicants.
Experience.
“2+ years in [insert job field] or related experience/related position” or “4-6 years experience in an agency” would glare at me in the list of requirements for the work opportunities I clicked away from.
It was frustrating to feel like I was stuck in a dead end after receiving my diploma in June 2017.
No longer was it a guarantee to immediately get a job after reaching a certain point in your education. Experience trumps over education as a requirement to be considered even remotely competent for work.
It's for that reason, I had to make opportunities for myself. After securing a part-time job, I had to push myself to start writing as a freelance blogger. It was a struggle to battle my own personal insecurities and every (silent) rejection I received from a company who did not think I was ready to work for them. For now, I try to balance a blog with my continuous search for a career that fits me, my voice-acting hobby and my so-called personal life.
The gig economy is a recent trend that brings temporary, freelance and contract work into the labour market. It allows workers to acquire jobs easily and quickly. It also offers workers more flexibility in how, when and where they work to balance their professional and personal lives as well as allowing them to work smarter and more efficiently.
According to a Udemy survey, 44% of millennial respondents between the ages of 21 to 37 stated that they prefer a flexible work schedule and 30% wanted to work a full-time position remotely.
The downsides to the gig economy are the lack of job benefits that are given to full-time permanent positions including: medical benefits, paid vacations, paid sick days and job stability.
With that being said, someone working in the gig economy is like a part-time worker. They forfeit the benefits of a full-time worker to gain a flexible schedule where they can allocate time to what they want to prioritize in their personal and/or work life.
Millennials: Loyalty to Companies Versus their Priorities
In my research of millennials in the labour market, some of the articles I found explained how employers could keep millennials in the workplace. Reading these articles and having worked alongside other millennials in retail for a year, the facts do reflect reality.
Udemy stated that millennial employees want to be loyal and remain in a company for more than three years. They may choose a job according to its salary, but they want to go in to work feeling more fulfilled and having accomplished more. They desire additional training and career development workshops to build their skills, a productive and healthy work environment as well as supportive managers who show they’re equally committed to the work as their employees. They have little desire for constant job hopping.
Other statistical data I’d found told another narrative concerning millennial employment engagement and loyalty at work. According to Deloitte,there was a shift in beliefs of millennials and Generation Z from 2017 to 2018. They believe that businesses should prioritize job creation, innovation and creating a positive impact on society and the environment rather than solely focusing on financial performance.
Millennials’ sense of loyalty to their jobs decreased as 44% of millennial respondents expected to leave their current employers in the next two years whereas 61% of Generation Z respondents stated that they would leave their current jobs in two years, if given the choice.
Personally, I feel I follow Udemy's findings in that it would be fantastic if I could find a job that I liked or was interested in where I felt I was growing and learning new skills. I feel that it's important to me that my work has merit because I'm in a phase of my life where I've left the realm of education to pursue creative projects and accomplish work that I'd been trained to do. What I've come to realize working "in-between" jobs is that school has only introduced a small fraction of the tasks I could be doing as a journalist. School was a closed and comfortable environment where you could trust that the teachers would steer you in the right direction. Teachers would care because it was their career.
There's no doubt that to keep the new generation of working professionals in a company would be to keep them happy. It is placing more value on tolerance, inclusivity and respect. If the employers start to slack on caring or downright disrespect their employees, then that is the point where employees recognize that their job isn't the crux of the problem, it's the people managing them.
I've seen it happen and a high turn-over rate in a customer service job becomes a pain in the butt.
Reflecting on this data and statistics, it’s interesting to see how most articles don’t mention if the new generation of workers are part-time or full-time. I think it makes a difference in the mentalities of these two groups.
Part-timers oftentimes lack loyalty to their jobs because they are busy balancing their priorities between work, school or other endeavours in their personal life. At times, the jobs they have are not related to their field of study, which makes them more detached from their work life since they believe they can pursue their careers elsewhere in the near future. Other motivations to leave a company could be the desire to earn more money, achieving personal goals aligning to their passions, flexibility in their work and personal lives or an issue with management.
Full-timers concentrate on their jobs as it's their source of income to support their livelihood however, they desire to balance their work and their personal life as well. Because they work more hours during the week compared to part-timers, they don’t have the same luxury to allot time to the things they want to accomplish in their personal lives.
The gig economy and the desire for company employers to keep millennials happy reflects how the labour market is and how it is slow to evolve. The gig economy may present less advantages than permanent full-time positions, but it allows individuals like millennials to be in charge of their occupations by determining their work habits and schedules.
Millennial employees want their careers to fulfill their desire for happiness and to accomplish goals of creating social impact and positive change in the world they live in. In order to be loyal to jobs, employees need tolerance, respect and inclusivity so that they can be engaged in their company’s work.
This is generation Y and Z: the generations of the future and their preferences for what the future of work should be.