Gig Work Tips #1, What I found out about the Gig Platforms

It has been a while since I started advocating the gig economy and its landscape. I have explained the context of the gig and its landscape in many of my previous articles. Most of us already know what the gig economy is but do we know how it works from the platform perspective? Therefore, I decided to explore a few well-known gig marketplace platforms for better views.

But, before I share further what I gathered from the experiences, allow me to outline one of the key fundamentals of this gig economy and its landscape again.

The key fundamentals of the gig economy relates to the workers, work, and the platform. They are the

  • workers’ diversified skills,
  • skill-driven work opportunities, and
  • technological platforms to facilitate the connection between workers and work provided by employers or clients.

All these three components are interconnected in today’s digital landscape which makes it easier for one to access it anywhere, anytime with a single touch point.

I, therefore, signed on to three marketplace platforms. The first thing I did was browse the types of jobs and what kind of gig workers (talents) are on the marketplace platform. And to sum it up, this is what I discovered.

The Workers

This is about the workers’ diversified skills. For easy consumption, I categorized it into three categories, they are

  • low-skilled gig who primarily perform standard and routine tasks that do not require a certain level of competency.
  • mid-skilled gigs require some level of technical expertise or knowledge. Most of these mid-skilled gigs may work independently to deliver specific work, tasks, and output based on the customer’s needs.
  • high-skilled gigs are more advanced knowledge gigs that provide more expertise, based on their specialization and expertise. Usually, clients will engage them for business strategic work, or complex tasks that may help them with an informed decision-making process.

Why do we need to determine the skill level? Well, understanding what is your skill level, will help you to effectively determine whether the platform caters to your existing skills. Most of the gig platforms will represent their clients based on specific industries and their needs.  So, you need to ensure the platform caters to the skills you have to offer.

The Work

If I understand it well, each platform has its primary industry and market niche. Their niche can be based on skill-driven opportunities.  Having that in mind,  the work will then mainly cater to specific types of services and industries.

For instance, one of the platforms focuses primarily on digital content marketing. By understanding that their focus is primarily on digital content marketing platforms, you can find a variety of work related to that industry or work. Some of those work related to digital content marketing can be content writers, graphic designers, digital marketers, etc.

Therefore if you opt for this platform then you need to ensure you have the specific industry or work skills with a specific niche, expertise, and credentials so that you can map your skills to suitable work and perhaps stand out from their competition.

The Platform

Besides the above, I also discovered there are other aspects related to these gig platforms and these few are important tips for you to note if you are considering gig work.

  • the origin of the platform as you need to be aware of the legal, and regulatory aspects of it.
  • the location where they serve most as they are more likely to serve the geographical location within their reach.
  • their market and industry so that you can assess their work demand and competition.
  • your fee, and price tag as you need to determine whether the fee bracket is within your budget.
  • taxation, do note of the tax implication and your tax obligation too.

There are more to the above but I can’t list them all here. But these are some of the key fundamentals.

To learn more, perhaps, you can start to subscribe and follow me as I will be sharing more in this series on the fundamentals of the Gig Economy and its landscape.

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