The Gig Economy for Pre-Gig Economy People
My grandfather worked at the same company for fifty-one years. He started at fourteen, sweeping floors, moved into delivery, grew into management, and retired with a pension and a gold watch.
The idea of working for three different people in the same month, none of whom he’d met in person, would have struck him as either impossible or crazy.
That’s the nature of the gig economy
And whether or not anyone planned it this way, it might be one of the most useful things that’s happened for people trying to figure out what unretiring looks like.
Most of what the gig economy offers: flexible hours, short commitments, your choice of what you take on, and getting paid for a specific skill rather than a role, is exactly what a lot of people in our audience are looking for.
Not a career, not a full-time commitment, something in between that fits into a life instead of becoming one.
Nobody’s talking to you about it
The platforms are designed for thirty-year-olds. The language is designed for thirty-year-olds. The onboarding, the interfaces, the entire culture of “gig work” assumes you grew up with a phone in your hand and a laptop on your knees.
If you’re sixty-five and you’ve spent your career in a world where work meant showing up to a place and doing a thing, the whole landscape feels foreign, even when the actual work is something you could do with your eyes closed.
A retired accountant doing bookkeeping through an online platform isn’t doing anything she hasn’t done a thousand times.
Closing the gap
But finding the platform, setting up a profile, figuring out how to get that first client that’s a different skill set entirely. And nobody’s teaching it to her.
A guy who spent forty years in construction and can fix anything isn’t lacking for skills. He’s lacking the bridge between what he knows how to do and the apps and platforms where people now look for that help.
This is a real gap. There are millions of people with decades of useful skills, knowledge, and reliability, all the things clients actually want, sitting on one side of that digital divide.
On the other side of that divide is a marketplace that would welcome them if anyone helped them build the on-ramp.
Going it alone
Some people figure it out on their own. They ask a grandchild for help setting up a profile. They watch YouTube videos. They try, fail, try again. It’s not graceful, but sometimes it works.
Others look at the whole thing and simply walk away, not because they can’t do the work, but because the door to the work doesn’t look like any door they’ve ever walked through before.
No neat answer
The gig economy isn’t going to redesign itself for the over-sixty crowd anytime soon. But if you’re looking for a way back into useful work on your own terms, the infrastructure actually exists. It’s just wearing clothes you might not recognize.
The work is familiar. The wrapper is new. And that wrapper is learnable… even if nobody’s made it easy yet.
If the gig economy is something you want to learn more about, leave a comment or email me. There’s a lot on information I’d be happy to share.