Gig Workers to Consultants to Entrepreneurs

I work in higher education, focused on working adults and other nontraditional students. Most of my students have returned to school because they want to advance their careers: either move up in their organizations, or change careers, or start their own businesses. At least, that has been our traditional understanding of these “comebackers.” But in the San Francisco Bay Area, where my university is located, and increasingly around the country, more and more of our students are looking to follow a different career trajectory: to get off the gig economy treadmill.

Really, though, it’s more complicated than just getting a job. Even before the pandemic, businesses in the Bay Area were moving to a business model increasingly dependent on casual and temporary workers—contractors. Nationwide, estimates of how many workers are in the gig economy in the US range from 1% to 34% of workers, depending on how it’s measured, but the numbers generally converge around 25% of workers earning some money (primary or secondary) from gig work. 10% of Americans use the gig economy as their main source of income. According to CNBC and Bloomberg, more than half of the people working at large tech firms like Google are contractors. This means that for many gig workers (sometimes referred to as contingent labor), there are not as many full-time, permanent jobs available.

What we need to do for them, then, is to get them to think about themselves and their labor differently, and to act accordingly. What our students are looking for is more control over their work and better, more stable work conditions—even if they remain independent contractors. There is a fine line between a gig worker and a freelancer, after all. And a fine line between a freelancer and a consultant, and another between any of those and an entrepreneur. All are classified as independent contractors by the US government, unless you have incorporated yourself as a business.

I am not suggesting we just start labeling these jobs differently as a way to boost people’s self-esteem. But each of these terms—gig worker, freelancer, consultant, entrepreneur—suggests a different level of control and intentionality. And higher education can provide people with the skills and mindset to change their relationships to work and the economy as a whole. This is of much greater value for education than content-based learning, especially in a region where the economy is constantly changing—in fact, is based on the idea of constant change. 

So what would it take for a gig worker to become a consultant? For starters, a plan of action. Is the work you are doing helping you acquire skills and experience that you can leverage toward some higher goals? Do you have expertise in any area, or can you learn how to become competent in that area? Do you know how to articulate your goals and expertise to others? We can help people with all of that. We need to teach learners how to make a plan, how to follow it, and how to adjust course when necessary.

From there, if the goal is working for yourself, a consultant can become an entrepreneur. I don’t want to be reductionist or make it seem like it’s easy to make a living as an entrepreneur (I am decidedly not an entrepreneur, at least not in terms of promoting myself), but it’s a worthwhile pursuit if it means getting off the gig economy treadmill. And the skills an entrepreneur needs can be acquired. Catherine Cote of Harvard Business School Online (of course I looked there) lists six:

• Basic Finance Skills
• Networking
• Speaking confidently
• Accepting and Acting on Feedback
• Recognizing Patterns
• Maintaining a Growth Mindset

That last one, I think, is the key to all the others—if you have a growth mindset, you are open to being a lifelong learner. All of these can be taught.

Sujan Patel writing in Entrepreneur (of course I looked there too) identifies even more skills an entrepreneur should have—17 in all. The key ones he adds to the list above involve hiring, training, and managing staff; focusing on your customers; and a desire to improve your world. All of these are important, but this last one has particular relevance for me, working as I do with adult working learners. I do this work because of my desire to improve the world (in some small way), expanding access and opportunity to people who might not have seen a path forward otherwise, so it is easy to incorporate this into the curriculum and convey this to the students in my school.

This is not to say that subject-specific knowledge shouldn’t be taught. But if education is to be transformational, it has to focus on mindset, on resilience, and on adaptability. It has to help students see themselves and their relationship to the world differently. And it has to meet them in the world in which they actually live, not the static world of most textbook learning.

 

An ungrateful son of a bitch

 

I have been asked, as part of a team-building process, to share with my colleagues what I am grateful for. I need to come up with one personal gratitude and one related to work. I've got nothing.

It is not that I am always unhappy, nor that I am not appreciative of the little things people do for me on a daily basis. When I ask people at work for assistance on a project, they usually show up and assist. (Yes, it’s usually something in their job descriptions, but still, they don’t have to be responsive.) Colleagues at other institutions are usually willing to provide advice or share their experiences, and I appreciate that. At home, my family is nice to me. I like having them around. I’m home with them, working remotely, so it’s important that we be nice to each other. I have a couple of friends who do what friends do.

But I am generally not “grateful” in any cosmic sense. I’m more of a stoic, I think: I take on each challenge as it comes. I try not to be swayed by the tiny little successes and failures that I encounter each day. I don’t think that means I lack emotion—I just absorb everything, good and bad, into my overall sense of the world. So the peaks and valleys of day-to-day life are going to happen, and they are smoothed out in the bigger picture. Good things aren’t granted to me, nor are the bad things a divine punishment, though sometimes they are my fault and I should have seen them coming. Ultimately, they probably strike some sort of balance. Maybe my balance has more highs than others have. I am doing okay, generally. I am still here. But, you know, we’re all going to die.

I am an atheist, and I am not in the habit of giving thanks to a higher power for all of my blessings, any more than I would curse a higher power for all of my burdens. I’ve also never been a participant in a 12-step program, in which people are pressed to think about the little triumphs of each day. (I have nothing against religion or 12-step recovery programs. They both have value to their adherents. I’m not a militant atheist—religion just doesn’t do anything for me.) I also am aware that there is research promoting expressions of gratitude in the workplace, as the key to increased job satisfaction, creativity, and team cohesiveness. Being asked to share my gratitudes, though, feels like an empty gesture, as though doing it will somehow make me appreciate my world and my colleagues more. I am not sure that it will. I already appreciate them enough, as much as they deserve. Also, I don’t necessarily want to know their personal stuff, and I don’t want them to know mine. I have made friends at work, but it is my choice to do that. Coming up with things to be grateful for edges awfully close to the idea that my organization should be one big happy paternalistic family, in which we share our emotional lives with each other like families do. Is it no longer okay to keep our personal and professional lives separate, despite the fact that everyone can hear my dog barking during video meetings now?

Postscript: I ran these ideas past my wife and my son, and they both tell me that I am full of crap. So feel free to take my side.

How to Support Students Through the Online Transition

Kayla Krupnick Walsh, Interim Dean of Students at Minerva Schools at KGI, and I wrote this article that appeared recently in Evolllution. Enjoy!

My life as a talk show host, so far

Why have I not been blogging regularly, you ask? Well, it is because I have launched a new side gig, as a talk show host. Okay, maybe it is a podcast with video. And it is just on Zoom. But it has a name: Back to the Baysics. (That's because this happens in the Bay Area. It's a play on words.) And the guests have been fascinating, really. And I ask excellent questions.

This is me (I'm on the right) talking with GGU Professor of Law Michele Neitz about blockchain and its implications for business, privacy issues, government records, and more. I have also discussed the cannabis industry with two entrepreneurs, adult learning theory and practice, the idea of placemaking (especially challenging during the pandemic), and the challenge of being a restaurant owner and a business owner of color during a time when 41% of black-owned businesses have closed. Tomorrow I am talking with Amelia Linde, the Small Business Policy and Engagement Manager at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.

Feel free to join us. Or come be on the show! These are broadcast live, and then we put them on YouTube where they will live forever.

OER and the mission-driven university

One of my passions in my work is expanding the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). It’s not only the cost savings to students that drives my interest in this, although at the most basic level that is what started my interest. Every week I read about an institution or a public system announcing that it has saved its students a million dollars or five million or whatever, which is great. But emerging from that initial proposition, there are other aspects of OER that are worth considering. For example, if you are a faculty member or instructional designer, there are the opportunities to collaborate with other like-minded professors and course designers on creating or tailoring OER materials to your students’ interests and needs. Collaboration can support a sense of community across institutions and within them. You can also adapt OER to improve classroom teaching and research. For example, if the course materials can be modified, students can be part of the process of reviewing, researching, and creating new content. This process can transform learning from a passive, consumer-oriented process to one in which learners become producers. That's what our mission should be.

Then there’s also just the power you get by taking control over your courses from the large commercial publishers. Their work is created at scale to serve a generic classroom in whatever general topic you teach, but what ends up happening is that many instructors are forced to bend their teaching to what is covered in the textbook. In fact, many courses are just designed around the textbook the instructor chooses: 

Week one, cover chapter 1. 

Week 2, chapter 2. 

Homework assignments: see the instructor’s manual for the textbook for a paper topic designed to measure knowledge of the textbook. 

Test questions: see the publisher-supplied test bank. 

Sure, that’s convenient, but I am not sure it’s why we went into higher education. I think it allows us to be lazy. On the other hand, adjunct instructors who get no prep time as part of their payments don’t always have the wherewithal to put aside the time to find course materials, develop creative assignments, and reflect on pedagogical approaches. But it does a disservice to students, and it begs the question of what education is.

OER gives both students and faculty the opportunity to be what they are supposed to be: lifelong, active learners. Commercial textbooks, controlled by others and closed to modification, turn both the student and the instructor into passive recipients of established knowledge, limiting the ability to challenge established conventions and discouraging curiosity. OER allows learning materials and approaches to be customized and tailored to fit local and individual needs. Teaching US History, but want to incorporate material on local participation in World War II? Remix and revise the content. Trying to respond to current events like the removal of a statue of a Confederate General? Modify the unit on Reconstruction. Add new material on Black Lives Matter. And update it again next year when new evidence emerges, or you have to teach this whole thing via Zoom.

Education is more than just transmitting content. It is teaching people how to continue to learn. When students graduate from your institution and go into the labor force, they are not done learning. You have not taught them everything they will ever need to know. You need to have taught them information literacy—how to evaluate information and determine what is valid and what is not. And those bits of information will change as circumstances and the economy and the politics of our society change. Information, as Stewart Brand said, wants to be free: it will evolve and be transmitted in ways that you are unable to predict. OER provides a better blueprint for the world in which information is free and not static, allowing students to be active producers of knowledge, not passive consumers.