According to a study by gig platform Upwork, more than half (52%) of Gen Z professionals surveyed worked as freelancers in 2023. Gig work puts flexibility at the forefront, replacing functions traditionally performed in-house with technology tools such as AI.
But there are two sides to this: some freelancers are thriving with the work they love and the schedule they want, while others are being left behind.
Suzanne Kutwaldlik, who graduated from Texas A&M University in 2018, applied to 70 jobs, received just one response and then lost contact.
Frustrated, she started taking on freelance projects in graphic design, and over the course of a couple of pandemic years, she packed up her project-based work to form Retrospective Media, a company where she is the only full-time employee.
“The jobs I can apply for don’t offer the same security or benefits that my parents and grandparents had,” Kutvurtlik said.
She represents a larger cultural shift in the overlapping terms of entrepreneurship, self-employment, freelancing and gig work: Since 2021, women — particularly young women and Black and Hispanic women — have largely driven the company-startup boom, many of whom are choosing flexibility over income.
According to a study by gig platform Upwork, more than half (52%) of Gen Z professionals surveyed in 2023 are working as freelancers, compared to 44% of Millennials, 30% of Gen Xers, and 26% of Baby Boomers. That’s good news for Upwork, which matches freelancers with employers, so much so that the company’s team introduced me to a rare success story on their platform: Ctvrtlik.
About 40% of Americans will work as freelancers in 2023, up about 10% from 2021 and driving a $1.3 trillion freelance economy. Upwork CEO Hayden Brown predicts that by 2027, the majority of the U.S. workforce will be freelance.
“Gen Z is definitely at the forefront of this huge shift away from traditional 9-to-5 employment and opting for freelance and different types of independent, entrepreneurial approaches to work,” said Tony Buffum, vice president of HR customer strategy at Upwork.
Is that okay?
The complexity of this topic has to do with the overlap of terms: Kutvrtlik’s growing love for work and the schedule she likes sound like human thriving, yet in many government data sources she appears not so different from a full-time ride-sharing driver living in poverty.
As part of our Thriving report series last year, Technical.ly wanted to better understand how many people are combining freelance work to focus on their passions — independent by choice. To get an idea of this, Technical.ly analyzed a five-year American Community Survey dataset from 2016 to 2020 and created a “gig work creative” category, defined as people with two or more contract employers, at least one of which falls into one of 30 occupational codes, including dance, photography, and visual arts.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the creative city of Los Angeles had the largest share of the population among the 20 U.S. cities compared; the only other cities with more than 1% of the population fitting this description were Austin, Seattle, and Minneapolis. By one estimate, these gig-working creatives are disproportionately younger than other independent worker populations.
Upwork’s research team made a distinction between those who choose gig work and those who fulfill short-term needs.
In a report this spring, the company outlined five “freelance career types”: Portfolio careers, independent consultants and company founders are long-term decisions, while side hustlers and gig workers often aren’t. Like Ctvrlik, nearly two in five Gen Zers surveyed fit into the “portfolio career” category, which Upwork describes as “skilled professionals who manage a multifaceted portfolio of different types of work across different clients, industries and projects.”
Upwork’s breakdown of the five categories of freelancers. (Provided)
Each category tells a different story. At least 10 percent of American adults, or 16 million people, are fully self-employed. Only a quarter of them employ employees, traditionally a reliable indicator of wealth creation. Informal work further complicates the picture: A 2014 Federal Reserve report found that 26 percent of Americans identified as not in the labor force work “off the books,” which could mean anything from selling food to neighbors to running a cash business.
Add it all up, and the average self-employed American makes less and has fewer worker protections than their traditionally employed peers. And yet, like millions of Americans, Ctvrtlik has come to value flexibility above all else, relying on a range of web and software tools, automation, and services to replace functions traditionally housed within companies.
Upwork’s Buffum noted that the hiring environment is also becoming more complicated for recruiters, as more workers are turning to project-based and skill-focused work arrangements. Employers are now competing with entrepreneurship, too.
“Technology allows for a frictionless work experience where you contract with a company, do a short-term project, get paid, learn new skills, and then immediately use those skills to get rewarded,” Buffam said. Half of Gen Z professionals use generative AI regularly, according to Upwork data, and adoption is even faster among freelancers at 61%.
These and other technologies and tools have allowed Retrospective Media to be much more productive than a single independent designer could have been in the past, Ctvrtlik says, which is why she advises others like her to think like company owners, not as individuals.
“If you want to do this full time and make it a viable career path, you’re running a business and you have to treat it as such,” Kutvurtlik said.
