What I Wish Everyone Knew About E-lance Industry.
The conventional imagery of the “Work” by reference to the hedgehog millstone gives a more open way of working, through the ever-growing digitization which threatens to replace work as we have known it for centuries. Bots or software designed to automate some features are the most observable and popular demonstration of tries to simulate some basic human interactions, like organizing meetings and finding prices for flights and hotels, to name a few. As the technology is becoming operationally mature, robots will turn into more smarter creatures, that can disrupt even the more cognitive tasks performed by humans today.
The Harvard Business Review published an article about the growth of Super-Temp in 2012, the refugee community of major corporations and law firms and consultants that value the autonomy and flexibility of temporary or project-oriented work and find that earnings are comparable to what they have earned in full-time jobs, sometimes-even better. Equipped with a laptop computer, an internet connection, and in-demand skills, the phenomenon of online freelance is becoming increasingly popular in India.
The gender gap in India’s working population is also of concern, it is one of the lowest Female Labour Force participation(LPPR) worldwide, this trend has also been declining since 2004–05, from 42.7% in 2004–05 to 23.7% in 2015–16. So freelancing is a great option for those who can’t find work outside or are interested in Remote work jobs.
Freelancing revolution in India
Dating as far back as the medieval period, the word ‘Freelancer’ has been commonly used as means of referring to a hired lance. A mercenary that offered to fight over the highest bidder. Over time, the word transcends battlefields and finds its way into business- freely, someone willing to provide unique and much-needed skills to those who want to pay for them. Freelancers were no longer constrained by time and geographic barriers or restricted to cold-calls, print ads, and local networks to find opportunities for self-employment.
“In 1998, Harvard Business Review released a premonitory article entitled, the Dawn of the “E-Lance Economy”, which seems to have predicted many ways in which the internet could change the way work is carried out. Modern literature calls this phenomenon the “Gig- Economy”. An increasing number of workers giving up traditional employment from 9 to 5 in favor of self-employment, task-by-task, for various employers.
The nature of freelancing has completely changed with the emergence of such online platforms as Guru.com, Truelance, and Elance.com (Now Upwork). It revolutionized how a client would hire and interact with freelancers. For the first time, clients and freelancers who have never met face-to-face or over the phone are collaborating on projects and carrying them out. Freelancers offer articles a wide variety of skill sets to select from and can find work all over the world sitting at home. The particularly beneficial for people in heavily served countries like India, where local compensation is lower than the global average. A subject of these online “outsourcing” channels, in which simple and small jobs require basic literacy and numeracy is referred to as micro-work.
The rapid increase in digital penetration has contributed to the trend of online freelancing in India. A market that has grown significantly over the past five years. According to some estimates, India is home to the second-largest market of independent professionals ( around 15 million), right next to the United States (around 53 million). These 15 million Indian freelancers represent approximately 40% of all freelance jobs available worldwide.
The Online Labour Index (OLI) developed under the labor project, at the University of Oxford is the first economic indicator that provides data related to the on-demand economy equivalent to traditional labor market statistics. It measures the availability and demand of online freelancers throughout countries and professions by tracking the number of projects and tasks through the platform in real-time. In July 2017, the Index pointed to skills that different countries bring to the global online marketplace. The top professional category in the USA is writing and translation while in India it is software and technology development. Although the Index currently uses data from four of the largest online workplace platforms, it is the representation of global trends in online sourcing. based on the traffic statistics, we can estimate that these four sites represent at least 40 percent of the worldwide marketplace for platform-based online work. As the reach of this data collection expands, we hope to see a more nuanced disaggregation of this global marketplace.
