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Don’t give up your day job – at least not until your night job starts paying the bills

For many of us, the idea of working at one job for the length of your working life is a thing of the past. But will it prove to be a brief flirtation or a cultural shift, asks Shane Rodgers.

Aug 11, 2022, updated Aug 11, 2022
Uber will soon start using telephones to order its rideshares. (Supplied image)

Uber will soon start using telephones to order its rideshares. (Supplied image)

Everywhere around us the forces of change are bubbling like molten magma working their way slowly to the surface.

Often these are microtrends that will eventually make small surface fissures. Others are rising forces of high intensity transformation, early hints of megatrends that will explode and rewrite our futures.

One of these forces, that could go either way, is the rise of so-called portfolio careers – a deliberate mix of career and business pursuits undertaken as an alternative to a single day job.

Anecdotally, I speak to many people who are proactively pursuing this approach to work. Some have been in the workforce for decades and are craving greater variety in their week. Sometimes this is a chance to pursue a “side hustle” while still earning enough to pay the bills.

Others are young people, shunning the old 9-to-5, Monday to Friday paradigm to try some things and live life on terms where they feel more in control of their weeks and their destiny.

It is early days, but it certainly feels like the Covid-19 pandemic has fast-forwarded the portfolio career considerations for many people. We are in a period where an unexpected disturbance in the force has given us the space to fundamentally reassess the way we work and live.

As of March this year, 6.3 per cent of the workforce held multiple jobs, equating to 857,900 people. The past two years have seen record percentages in this space. Curiously, these record figures are coinciding with the best job market Australia has seen in many decades.

There could be plenty of reasons for the record high. It could reflect people using the buoyant job market to pursue riskier career moves and portfolio career dreams with a solid safety net.

Equally, the awakening of inflation from decades of relative slumber might be encouraging more families to seek extra income from multiple sources, particularly if they were previously under-employed.

Some of it could be people chasing more income to lift their living standards while the opportunity is there.

Even before the pandemic, there were some interesting trends in the multi-job space, particularly with the rise of the so-called gig economy.

While the broader implications of the gig economy are highly contentious, in many respects it represents an activation of economic assets that were previously dormant – cars sitting in garages at night, empty spare rooms, utes sitting in the street on weekends, bicycles breeding spider webs in sheds.

Certainly, some people activate these assets because they need the money to make ends meet. Others might do it to supplement their income. The guy that used to cut my hair ran a barber shop during the day and turned his car into an Uber at night “to pay for the little extras”.

It is too early to draw any firm conclusions from the multi-jobs data on whether we are on the verge of a portfolio job eruption or just seeing some molten bubbling.

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Although the proportion of people in multi-jobs is at the highest levels since the Australian Bureau of Statistics started counting in 1995, the percentage point growth is less than 1 per cent over that period. And multi-jobs actually fell briefly to a 25-year low (4.9 per cent) in the early days of the pandemic in 2020.

In raw number terms, however, there are nearly 400,000 more people working multiple jobs now than in 1995. A separate ABS survey, that measures the number of people in multiple jobs at any time during a full year (rather than a point in time), puts the multiple job holder numbers above 2 million, stretched over the longer period.

A 2017 article by Professor Roger Wilkins of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne said the biggest group of multi-job holders were young women in the arts and recreational services industries.

Using the institute’s longitudinal study of Australian households (known as HILDA), Wilkins said most multi-job holders fell into two categories.  The first were people in full-time employment supplementing their income with relatively small additional hours doing things like private tutoring and informal child-care. The second were people stitching together multiple jobs to achieve enough hours of work to meet their income wants and needs.

Over the next few years, it will be fascinating to see whether this second group break off into a larger cohort of portfolio-seekers who are deliberately stitching together a multi-job life rather than pragmatically gluing together a collection of jobs to achieve critical mass.

On a side note, the portfolio career crowd also have a personal branding challenge in a world where we have tended to define people by their “job”.

What do you say when people ask what you do? What do you put on your business card (or digital equivalent)? How do you structure your LinkedIn profile?

The term “moonlighting”, once used to describe what was often an under-the-radar second job, might also be obsolete. Second jobs are far more likely to be happening in daylight, and in full view. I am still not sure if “daylighting” has the same ring to it.

Shane Rodgers is a business executive, writer, strategist and marketer with a deep interest in what makes people tick and the secret languages of the workplace. Comments in this article are personal and not related to my day job.

 

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