Why gig jobs are beating big jobs right now
Last night I was planning my trip to Cannes (that's right mofos), and mid panicking about where the hell to stay without breaking the bank, I saw another semi-panicked message on a group I'm part of.
Doing everything right
It was a CMO with 25+ years of experience, and what seemed to be an excellent track record of delivering consistent commercial results, who since redundancy had struggled to find a new permanent job.
On the one hand, it was useful to see other CMOs reflecting similar experiences to help them feel seen (sometimes that's all you can do), but on the other there's a significant aspect of this that makes me think about the nature of employment, and self-employment.
If we couple these anecdotes with the hypothesis that, because of AI agents, a lot of future organisations might be diamond shaped (slim at the bottom, thicc in the middle because someone needs to coordinate the agents themselves, slim at the top), then there's a strange picture that begins emerging where you can do everything right, and still feel like the market is punishing you for it somehow.
Big jobs to gig jobs
In March 2024, I was made redundant and a few days later secured my very first client consulting job. A lucky break I guess, or a lot of prep work that coincided neatly, as others have suggested to me.
Either way, the feeling was dissonant, because on the one hand the job I had for nearly 7 years felt safe... until it didn't. And in the absence of a safety net, you look for safety in other places. The answer for me was momentum, in that I became convinced my mind couldn't really stop searching for the next thing because no one else was going to give it to me. Two years in, I still deeply believe this.
What strikes me these days is that perhaps I never wanted the big jobs anyway. I've seen one too many heads of [whatever] turn from quite joyous people to someone who was clearly gaining power in their job, but somehow the light had come out of their eyes. It's quite strange when someone you respected transforms like that over time.
In practical terms though, this opens a question about the nature of how careers progress. How come we should always aspire to the big job? What if some of us have our brains wired to prefer gig jobs instead? Jobs where there's a clear beginning and end, you get in, help unpack and resolve what you can, and then hand it back over.
It may not be for everyone's appetite, but it's what the market seems to be rewarding right now. We could call them patchwork projects. We could call them fractional jobs. We could call them interventions (a personal favourite). Whatever we do call them, they seem to be an intermediary answer we've collectively found to make sense of whatever AI may or may not do to the nature of the labour market.
Different amounts
Which takes me back to one of the best pieces of advice I've heard about this consulting and self-employment thing. It was from Tom Morton, who said: "be buyable in different amounts". It's useful to reflect on what is the $1,000 version of our services, vs the $5,000 version, vs the $10,000 version, vs the $50,000 version, and so on.
It's also useful to determine way in advance what is the smallest amount you'd get out of bed for. I appreciate this may sometimes come from a position of luxury, and by all means if you got nothing else going on go with what is paying right now, but I've found it helpful to determine some a priori conditions for client engagements.
For example:
I scope consulting projects on either a day rate level or a project level, depending on who I am dealing with (day rates still work better for agencies, project rates for organisations)
I try to not do a project that is less than £5,000 / $7,000 at a time, because the time commitment and context switch and the opportunity cost of other potential gigs is not sustainable
Which means that if I scope a day rate based project, my a priori condition is you can pay me my day rate but on the basis of a minimum consecutive number of days to make up the total amount that project would be worth for my business
But that said, sometimes folks just want a few hours of your time, in which case it's perfectly reasonable to have a different pricing model which is an hourly rate where you calculate how much an hour of your time is worth and add a premium to it
The point of this exercise is not to say "do as I do", but rather to help you think about your own time as a portfolio which you can split and allocate and monetise in different ways that suit you best.
Big jobs don't encourage us to think like this, because what matters is the paycheck figure that you get on a consistent basis. It's the index fund of income, if you will. Not always a huge gain at a time, but a consistent steady. Whereas gig jobs need to act a bit more like a VC portfolio model, where a lot of bets will be ok-ish or a loss, and a few others make up for it big time. Maybe only 10% of client work will ever secure you a five-figure project in one go, but that's the game.
Different fish
The saddest part of our current predicament is not that we know economic disaster is upon us, it's just that we don't know. And the uncertainty attached to not knowing creates a negative spiral that is very hard to get out of. I still get into it every now and then too.
But when that happens, I've found consolation not only in salmon, who relentlessly swim against the current because something in their nature tells them they can't not do that, but also sharks, some of which are biologically primed to never stop moving or they suffocate.
The answers some of the above CMOs offered were a mix of 'keep going' and 'build your own thing instead', which are a good example of this fishy philosophy which I've become such a fan of. When there are no clear answers, we can't expect certainty nor should we aspire to recreate it. All we can do is find ways to keep building sustainable momentum in the hope that meaning will come afterward as a result.
