Back in February, we asked people “What will you be optimizing on your next gig?” and invited people to take a short survey to share their own aspirations.

With the nature of work shifting rapidly and more and more people transitioning (willingly or not) into the contingent or gig economy, it is important to understand what people are really looking for as they move across projects and companies.

Based on interviews with people participating in our round tables (so far we have sat down with senior consultants, junior consultants and project managers) we came up with seven aspects that people consider when making a choice: Income, Equity, Learning, Network (contribution to building their network), Team (team quality), Balance (work-life balance), Social Impact. We renamed ‘Wealth’ as ‘Equity’ to make this aspect easier to understand and added Work-Life Balance as an additional aspect at the suggestion of several human resources experts.

Overall people have a pretty balanced approach to what they look for when choosing a new gig. But people are realists, and Income (how much money I will make) and Team Quality (who I will be working with) are what matter the most. Almost as important are opportunities to learn and work-life balance.

We also asked people about the stage of their career they are at: Entering, Established, Peak (we also had a few responses from people who are preparing to exit the workforce, but we filtered these out).

People early in their career said that learning is the most important consideration, followed by the opportunity to build up their networks and the quality of the team.

For people already well established, team quality is most important followed by learning and income. These people are in their 30s and 40s, they know how important the team is to success and they are under pressure to earn money.

Once people are at their peak it is earning money that is most important. Other things are important, but income comes first.

For the group surveyed, which skews to people working in the technology industry, social impact is the least important factor in choosing a gig. This is a bit surprising to me, and disappointing, but at least this made the consideration set and there were a few people for whom it was the most important criteria.

Another thing that we looked for was differences between people who are looking for full-time employment and people who are independent. In fact, we looked at four approaches: Looking for Full-Time Employment; Looking for Part-Time Employment; Looking for Project Work; Looking or Independent Consulting Work. We only got enough responses to parse out the Full-Timers vs. Independent Contractors.

The independents are more focused on income and are relatively uninterested in equity (there were a few exceptions though, independent consultants who are primarily interested in equity and for whom income was irrelevant when these people are filtered out the result is even sharper). What is surprising is that independent consultants feel that the opportunity to build networks is felt to be relatively unimportant by consultants. Follow-up interviews found that most consultants use other mechanisms to build and maintain their networks, such as board positions or involvement with non-profits or professional associations, and did not rely on projects for this.

People looking for full-time work are modestly more interested in equity than are independent consultants (but the income was still more important than equity) and are much more interested in building their networks, perhaps because they have not developed as many alternative ways to do this apart from work.

We plan to dig deeper into how people choose teams and projects in the coming months. Let us know what you are thinking about this and how TeamFit can help you as you make career choices.

Survey Demographics

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