Good jobs are scarce. Money is tight.We need to bring in cash now while we look for a quality job. But how? We have questions like:
Where to find gig jobs?
How to enter the hustle economy?
What about fractional employment?
Essentially: how to get a job while looking for the job?
We explored these questions and their possible answers recently with Carrie Brekke and Andrew Segars - two Career Pivot community members. They talked with us about the jobs they are finding now that can be ways for us to generate needed income today.
Hyper Local Jobs
The easiest gig jobs to get are through your neighbours, a neighborhood listserve (like Nextdoor), or local Facebook groups. Here you can do anything from mowing lawns to walking dogs, or looking after kids. Think about a skill you have and market that to the masses.
These hustle economy jobs may be easy, but they don’t pay that well, and you can be competing with teenagers or other casual laborers who may have more energy and less financial needs than you. Worse, you have to tell people that you’re unemployed, which can be, well, messy.
But if you are willing to put yourself out there, you never know what quick cash opportunity might come your way.
Platform Jobs
A digital platform job connects you, as a freelancer, with specific tasks or projects. They can be a better way to do odd jobs than dealing directly with people, as you know you’ll get paid. You can work when you want, which can be good when you also need to do job search activities.
However, you may not be paid that much when you are working for Instacart, Uber, Care, Rover, DoorDash UberEats TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, Upwork, or Fivrr. The payouts can be pretty small on a per-hour basis, especially compared to what we were making.
Also, for the platform jobs that require you to be somewhere physically, like Uber or TaskRabbit, you need to live in or near a populous place that has enough demand to give you work.
An option that is growing in popularity is teaching English online to students around the world. These platforms, like VIPKids or Preply, don’t require you to have a teaching degree or TESOL certificate and you can make anywhere from $15 to $30 per hour.
Small Online Businesses
If you believe the Instagram influencers, you can open a dropshipping business tomorrow and be rolling in cash by the weekend. If only you buy their $499 course. Please don’t fall for that scam.
Creating and running a small business is hard.
Selling on etsy, getting traction on TikTok, and making money with Amazon are professions in themselves, requiring all the effort, time, and resources as starting a consultancy in your field, where you have a much higher probability of success.
We all have a lot of experience in traveling the world for our previous professions but a quick glance at your local Facebook group will show you that there are about 200 other “travel advisors” in your vicinity.
Selling trips to Disney or Universal are a lot of fun but take a lot of time and effort to build up clients. Plus, you don’t get paid until those people complete their vacation (meaning all those hours you spend planning are for “free” and you better hope they actually take the trip).
Either way, be careful not to get sucked into a multi-level marketing scheme; yes, those exist even in the Disney travel advising world.
Fractional Employment
Fractional employment means you are working as a part-time employee at the higher levels in a company or organization. Many of us have the skills and experience to be leaders at startups, scale-ups, or social impact organizations. We can be C-level (COO, CTO, CMO, etc.) leaders - the ‘adult in the room.’
Eric Schmitt was the ‘adult in the room’ during the early years of Google, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin couldn’t manage the company themselves. And he retired a multi-billionaire.
Andrew gave his own experience of taking a strategic sabbatical in 2017, when he left USAID and then worked part-time in a fractional C-level position with an online fitness company. He hired other fractional C-level staff, as the company was in scale-up mode, looking for experienced senior staff, but not at full-time prices.
Fractional positions, unlike consultancies, often offer opportunities to have real decision-making authority, while not having to devote yourself full-time to one organization or business. Positions could be time-bound, project-based, or lead to full-time positions—all depending on the goals and trajectory of the organization.
Companies like Graphite, Bolster, Fractional Exec, Toptal, Catalant, Gofractional focus on factional employment. AngelList, Wellfound, Startup jobs, Impact Hub, or B Lab focus on startup companies. Or you could go old-school and meet startup leaders in co-working spaces, startup accelerators, or business innovation hubs.
Do not expect to make a large salary. Small companies, startups, or scale-ups often offer equity/shares in lieu of full salaries. Yet it can be rewarding to have purpose, place, and success with private sector firms or social impact enterprises, and that will put you on the short list to be hired full-time as the organization grows.
Have you been a fractional employee? If so, where? What was it like?
Have quite a lot of experience in this, and would suggest one way a substitute per diem teacher. In NY you do not need a license if you teach fewer hours, you choose if you will sub or not. It’s not much money but it’s something.