How to thrive in a gig economy as an IT professional?
How to thrive in a gig economy as an IT professional?
Two inescapable trends are hitting the workplace. Jobs would disappear with organizations increasingly using gig workers to get work done and with automation making many job roles redundant.
When my peers in the industry neared their fifties, they started looking at ways of being on their own. This was driven by two compulsions: either they had outlived their utility in the organizations, or they couldn’t find jobs at other organizations. In many professions people are pushed in this direction and they have to resort to handling professional assignments from multiple companies to make a living.
Such people used to call themselves as freelancers or consultants. A fanciful name has come up to describe what they do: gigs. The practice of surviving doing gigs, which are assign-ments that require specific professional skills, and with companies getting their work done increasingly using gig workers, it leads to what is called the ‘gig economy’.
The phenomenon has been lately prevalent amongst professionals with very little or no work experience also. Young graduates — programmers, designers, event managers, digital marketers, and many others — are striking out on their own right from the beginning by choice.
The gig economy is here to stay. Organizations would increasingly get more work done by gig workers. The workplace of the future would be very different from what it is today. Or-ganizations would have flat hierarchies with work getting done through a network of con-tributors, no big departments handling specific functions, and a thin layer of functional co-ordinators who would bring together aspects of a particular function.
Automation is an important trend that is portrayed to be an even more potent threat to loss of jobs. Industrial automation aside, there is also the trend of using business process auto-mation through RPA that would lead to a mass scale reordering of white-collar jobs. From a technology standpoint, RPA is rapidly converging with AI and there has been lot of talk about AI leading to job loss. McKinsey & Co. predicts that AI (broadly defined) will eliminate 77,000,000 jobs over the next 20 years: “our scenarios suggest that by 2030, 75 million to 375 million workers (3 to 14 percent of the global workforce) will need to switch occupa-tional categories.” A Forbes article states: the real challenge is to those early in their careers and those about to launch one; those new or about-to-enter-the-workforce need to pay very special attention to AI and RPA – and plan accordingly.
How should career seekers brace themselves up for the gig economy and the auto-mation juggernaut?
The only answer to these questions is to strive and reach for the better — now and for the future. This would involve investing with a sense of urgency in acquiring skills for the fu-ture, changing current behaviors to suit the future requirements, adopting a growth mind-set, and making oneself comfortable with change.
If you going to be part of the gig economy, you need to constantly watch the new trends and invest in learning new skills that will be in demand in the future. Having acquired new skills, you will also need to be one of the early ones to do work in that area so that when things get mainstream, you get counted as one of the most seasoned hands in that area.
Leaping into the gig economy calls for some shocks that go beyond the initial readjustments required in the work routines; it calls for a permanent reordering of how work is done and what is required to keep getting work to be done. Of course, it does call for showcasing your skills, networking, and marketing.
A recent study and an article in HBR (Thriving in the Gig Economy by Gianpiero Petriglieri, Susan J. Ashford, Amy Wrzesniewski) states that gig workers felt a host of personal, social, and economic anxieties without the cover and support of a traditional employer, despite the freedom in choosing what to work on that they enjoyed. The article outlines the need to en-dure the emotional ups and downs of their work and gain energy and inspiration from their freedom.
Handling the inescapable onslaught of automation requires career seekers to be automa-tion-trained. Automation skills would be as important as word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation skills. While automation promises huge increase in productivity and better employee experience, it would not lead to jobs getting totally displaced. But it does call for doing new things. If one learns automation skills in time, one can get into roles that oversee automated processes be it HR or finance or marketing or any other. Automation skills will help them deliver value of higher order to the organizations.
Author: Ed Nair
Ed Nair, an Award-winning technology journalist, has a deep understanding of the dynamics of the IT industry and C-level issues in managing technology. Currently, he is leading con-tent, thought leadership, research, and communications (including media/ PR) function for India at UiPath, the global leader in enterprise RPA.
How to thrive in a gig economy as an IT professional?
How to thrive in a gig economy as an IT professional?
Two inescapable trends are hitting the workplace. Jobs would disappear with organizations increasingly using gig workers to get work done and with automation making many job roles redundant.
When my peers in the industry neared their fifties, they started looking at ways of being on their own. This was driven by two compulsions: either they had outlived their utility in the organizations, or they couldn’t find jobs at other organizations. In many professions people are pushed in this direction and they have to resort to handling professional assignments from multiple companies to make a living.
Such people used to call themselves as freelancers or consultants. A fanciful name has come up to describe what they do: gigs. The practice of surviving doing gigs, which are assign-ments that require specific professional skills, and with companies getting their work done increasingly using gig workers, it leads to what is called the ‘gig economy’.
The phenomenon has been lately prevalent amongst professionals with very little or no work experience also. Young graduates — programmers, designers, event managers, digital marketers, and many others — are striking out on their own right from the beginning by choice.
The gig economy is here to stay. Organizations would increasingly get more work done by gig workers. The workplace of the future would be very different from what it is today. Or-ganizations would have flat hierarchies with work getting done through a network of con-tributors, no big departments handling specific functions, and a thin layer of functional co-ordinators who would bring together aspects of a particular function.
Automation is an important trend that is portrayed to be an even more potent threat to loss of jobs. Industrial automation aside, there is also the trend of using business process auto-mation through RPA that would lead to a mass scale reordering of white-collar jobs. From a technology standpoint, RPA is rapidly converging with AI and there has been lot of talk about AI leading to job loss. McKinsey & Co. predicts that AI (broadly defined) will eliminate 77,000,000 jobs over the next 20 years: “our scenarios suggest that by 2030, 75 million to 375 million workers (3 to 14 percent of the global workforce) will need to switch occupa-tional categories.” A Forbes article states: the real challenge is to those early in their careers and those about to launch one; those new or about-to-enter-the-workforce need to pay very special attention to AI and RPA – and plan accordingly.
How should career seekers brace themselves up for the gig economy and the auto-mation juggernaut?
The only answer to these questions is to strive and reach for the better — now and for the future. This would involve investing with a sense of urgency in acquiring skills for the fu-ture, changing current behaviors to suit the future requirements, adopting a growth mind-set, and making oneself comfortable with change.
If you going to be part of the gig economy, you need to constantly watch the new trends and invest in learning new skills that will be in demand in the future. Having acquired new skills, you will also need to be one of the early ones to do work in that area so that when things get mainstream, you get counted as one of the most seasoned hands in that area.
Leaping into the gig economy calls for some shocks that go beyond the initial readjustments required in the work routines; it calls for a permanent reordering of how work is done and what is required to keep getting work to be done. Of course, it does call for showcasing your skills, networking, and marketing.
A recent study and an article in HBR (Thriving in the Gig Economy by Gianpiero Petriglieri, Susan J. Ashford, Amy Wrzesniewski) states that gig workers felt a host of personal, social, and economic anxieties without the cover and support of a traditional employer, despite the freedom in choosing what to work on that they enjoyed. The article outlines the need to en-dure the emotional ups and downs of their work and gain energy and inspiration from their freedom.
Handling the inescapable onslaught of automation requires career seekers to be automa-tion-trained. Automation skills would be as important as word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation skills. While automation promises huge increase in productivity and better employee experience, it would not lead to jobs getting totally displaced. But it does call for doing new things. If one learns automation skills in time, one can get into roles that oversee automated processes be it HR or finance or marketing or any other. Automation skills will help them deliver value of higher order to the organizations.
Author: Ed Nair
Ed Nair, an Award-winning technology journalist, has a deep understanding of the dynamics of the IT industry and C-level issues in managing technology. Currently, he is leading con-tent, thought leadership, research, and communications (including media/ PR) function for India at UiPath, the global leader in enterprise RPA.
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