ET Careers webinar: Taking the road to freelance gigs as a career option
In some of these cases, highly qualified people are choosing freelancing or gigs as a way of working. They do it as they see several advantages like flexibility, and possibility of greater income and work-life balance.
Yet, it is still considered difficult to make gig work a long-term career. How can we enable that transition?
In a recent ET Careers webinar to find answers to such emerging questions, we spoke with Sunil C, CEO of TeamLease Digital, which is helping many companies find the right gig talent, and with Arjun Nair, Cofounder, Great Learning, a firm helping many professionals upskill their way to better roles, including gig ones.
Both acknowledged that some challenges make this journey more difficult. There are no fixed pay cheques, leading to variability in income.
And a person choosing this road is, literally, alone while having to manage multiple aspects from getting projects to executing them and all other related aspects.
At the same time, there is a growing need for white-collar gig roles, specially in highly technical areas such as coding, cyber security, content, design, marketing, and from experienced professionals who see the potential of such employment avenues. Sunil estimated that “currently the market for this kind of workforce is about 1% of the labour market and it is expected to go up significantly over the next few years to over 4% of the market.”
While jobs were considered to provide a safe pay cheque earlier, the duo said that with more uncertainty today, building multiple sources of income over a long term through a gig way of working can even become more stable and profitable.
But it all starts with the mindset, “You need a mindset of being able to take risks.
