Dig into the gig economy for more employment opportunities

When fear stalks the land, all activities generally go for a toss. This is particularly so in the economic sphere. The coronavirus epidemic has forced factories to a grinding halt, jobs are hard to come by and no one knows for sure what is in store.

But not all is lost.

Matt Barrie, the CEO of freelancer.com, the largest online freelancing and crowdsourcing platform in the world by number of users and jobs posted, said that there was a steady demand for skilled labor with programming skills such as coding, web development, social media development and online marketing, mobile application design, legal-related jobs and home-related skills in the first quarter of this year.

"In these times of crisis, online freelancing truly is a boon for job seekers looking to generate income. Platforms like ours post over 10,000 jobs a day across 1,600 job categories globally. There's also no better time than now to start a business or to launch new projects as almost every business in the world is forced to work online. And if you need help with getting it all up and running, you can hire freelancers through platforms very inexpensively to set it all up."

According to Barrie, there has been a 41 percent increase in the freelance jobs posted on his platform in the second quarter of this year compared with the same period a year ago, with the total number of jobs rising to 605,000 from 429,000. On a quarterly basis, the growth this year has been 25 percent with the total number of jobs posted rising from 482,000 to 605,000.

Globally the biggest increase in terms of freelance jobs during the second quarter of the year was for work related to mathematical modeling, especially in sectors like mathematics and algorithm projects. Barrie said this is largely due to the increasing volume of digital and electronic data. "With the COVID-19 outbreak, the amount of data has dramatically risen due to tracking and tracing of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, mortality rates, tests conducted and more, as well as the impacts of the pandemic."

Healthcare, governments, businesses and media are among the majority of employers hiring number crunchers to interpret, analyze and report the data relating to COVID-19, he said.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for mathematicians and statisticians is projected to grow by 30 percent from 2018 to 2028, which is much faster than the average for all occupations.

In China, demand has been rising steadily for work related to translation, especially in sectors like English, article rewriting, content writing, copywriting, article writing, ghostwriting, internet marketing, research writing, 3D modeling and logo design.

One of the bright sides of a locked-down economy has been that it has spawned several budding entrepreneurs, many of whom made the best of it in the second quarter by starting new e-commerce businesses, said the Freelancer study. There has also been a rise in jobs associated with video gaming, said Barrie.

Wei Lu, group president of CDP Group, a Shanghai-based employment services provider which has been providing flexible work opportunities in China since 2012, told CGTN in a recent interview that there has been a 50 percent growth in talent requirements from the online education sector and e-commerce platforms.

When it comes to gig (short-term employment or freelance work) economy or shared economy, the numbers are even better. Quoting a recent report of the Sharing Economy Research Center, which works under the State Information Center, Xinhua News Agency said that China's sharing economy grew to over 3.2 trillion yuan ($457 billion) in 2019, registering a growth of 11.6 percent year-on-year. Furthermore, about 800 million people in China were part of the sharing economy in 2019, 78 million of whom were service providers.

Lu's statements also echo with the Chinese government's priority for stabilizing employment and ensuring living standards this year. The government plans to add over 9 million new urban jobs and keep the surveyed urban unemployment rate at around 6 percent, according to this year's government work report. A total of 4.6 million new urban jobs have already been created in the first five months of 2020.

"While COVID-19 has been the trigger of the already upward trending freelancer movement, the exponential growth can also be attributed to the strong desire for individuals to start their own enterprises, work on their own terms and supplement their income. These are indeed promising times and positive signs for the gig economy," said Barrie.