The gig economy expands into new professional disciplines

July 24, 2023 57

The gig economy has been widely praised, and in some circles condemned, for how it’s adjusted casual working norms. For example, riders delivering food through services like DoorDash, drivers riding with Lyft and Uber. Freelancers working online could be considered part of the gig economy – that is if there’s a gig to be worked. The easy onboarding of temporary or cycling staff can be applied.

In many ways, the gig economy is nothing new. We only need to ask musicians, artists, and others that work for client briefs or if there’s enough interest in their work to see how this works. With the advent of AI, remote work, consulting, and freelancing, we’re starting to see how the baseline principles of the gig economy are expanding into new professional fields.

Agency onboarding and time tracking in the gig economy

Agencies, leveraging more clients and workers from all over many professional sectors, are looking to time track and integrate solutions for fair compensation and remuneration. This way, agency time tracking software can help calculate exact paid time off, pay per project work, or the management of a growing team that may require different schedules.

This can help you more easily work with people across the world. It can help even hire new positions such as a weekend editor for your website. Agency onboarding is set to not only become an alternative to conventional hiring practices. In addition, one of the mainline integrations that a growing number of brands are using.

Vendors between clients and freelancers

Many vendors and brands have utilized a “middle-man” system between clients and professionals. Freelancers will stand to grow and expand into new fields. So far it’s not hard to see how services like Fiverr act as general-purpose commissioning vendors. Meanwhile, Upwork relates to the freelance writing niche.

As this norm develops, we can expect services to come into play for professional consulting, large-scale recruitment, market research, quality assurance services, and even modular legal advice.

In some cases, we’ve seen industries move into this model. An example would be how SEO marketing agencies may focus on pairing SEO professionals to clients who may not have to interact directly. This would simplify each side of the relationship.

AI-leveraged positions in the gig economy

AI is improving, leveraging, developing, and even infesting the job market in a wide variety of roles. Whether it’s note-taking apps now using AI to help structure lists and project outlines, to companies using AI to scour recruitment applications for the exact specifications they’re looking for (or even identifying when AI has been used in covering letters), we can expect the gig economy to full utilize AI to pair aforementioned client relationships, to onboard potential professionals, and to negotiate contract updates based on performance, or remuneration based on competitiveness and market need.

While the gig economy has its detractors, we can certainly expect its norms to grow and become even more influential. We’ll seek to update you as these renewed standards come to pass.