Upwork的“2016年的自由职业者”报告表明上升趋势

TodayUpwork发布其第三届年度“美国自由职业者”调查结果，与自由职业者联盟共同赞助，由研究公司Edelman Berland进行。万博体育下载app该调查在2014年，2015年和2016年使用了相同的方法，从而允许一些趋势信息。这项调查一直是自由职业者和自由职业者在一系列不同调查结果的基础上，表明，在先前的12个月内完成了某种薪酬自由职业的人数（可能会加速）趋势截至2014年7月，2015年7月和2016年。

在我们这里的覆盖范围内，我们将少关注态度调查结果（可以在报告中详细审查）和更多关于自由职业者人口和参与统计数据。以下是一些主要结果：

First, based on the survey, the number of people over 18 years old who have done some sort of freelancing in the previous 12 months of each survey increased from 53M in 2014 to 55M in 2016 (an increase of 2M people freelancing or an increase of nearly 4%).

大多数增加（1.3米）在2015年和2016年之间发生（因此，可能加速向上趋势）。

值得注意的是,虽然估计自由职业者population grew by about 4% from 2014 to 2016, the US civilian labor workforce grew by only 2%. In effect, this says that the freelancer population has grown at about twice the rate of the total aggregate workforce.

The study breaks down the freelancer population into five categories:

检查不同细分市场的增长率，积极增长只发生在两个部分中：“多元化的工人”和“自由企业主人”：

It is not clear why the data indicate there have been decreases in some of the other categories (particularly temporary workers). But it is interesting—and full of implications—that the Diversified Worker segment has been the fastest growing, perhaps reflecting the high growth in the gig/on-demand platform segment and the increase in people wanting to or needing to piece together multiple sources of income.

So what does this mean for contingent workforce managers?

One of the key points of interest is whether there is growth in the non-agency temp contingent workforce. From this data, it’s not that clear. Traditional independent contractor populations are shown as declining. And while the Diversified Worker segment is shown as increasing, it’s not clear how this population aligns to enterprise needs for talent and contingent labor. To understand this, it would be necessary to go down a level and look at skills, etc. and see which categories might be growing or declining.

All that said, the survey report does tell us that (1) the number of people doing some sort of “freelancing” is a big number (55M) and (2) some segments of that freelancer population are increasing. Moreover, it appears that within this population, people are increasingly freelancing by choice, technology is an enabler and, further, that the upside is freedom and flexibility, while the main downside is predictability of income. Here again, it would be important to dig deeper and look at differences across sub-categories.

The common wisdom these days is that there is a trend toward more freelancing, independent workers, micro-businesses — if we do dig deeper, we believe we’ll likely find pockets and sources of talent and labor that are growing and of value to enterprises.