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Self-Employment Shifting to the Creative Class
Well known author and academic Richard Florida has written extensively about the rise of the creative class. According to his work, the creative class - a grouping of knowledge-based professions - has rapidly increased its share of total employment...
Self-Employment Increases with Age
One of the interesting aspects of self-employment is that the likelihood of being self-employed increases with age. The chart below shows self-employment as a percentage of total employment by age group. The data comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor...
The End of Work? Or the Beginning of an Independent Economy? [VIDEO]
Well known tech journalist and analyst Tom Foremski's Futurists ... and the 'End of Work' looks at the employment disruption being caused by digital technologies. He argues that technology is destroying more jobs that it's creating, leading to...
The Rise of the Underground Economy
Last year we suggested growth in the underground economy is likely a key reasons workforce participation has fallen so much in the U.S. Others are starting to also suggest this. Noted author James Surowiecki's New Yorker article The...
What is a Spurious Correlation?
This is a bit more geeky than we like to get here at Smallbizlabs, but the rise of big data is resulting in growing numbers of people being exposed to statistical data and jargon. A spurious correlation is a statistical term that describes a...
Flexibility is Why Companies Hire Contingent Workers
Staffing firm Allegis and the Human Capital Institute teamed up on a study on how corporate procurement and HR departments view the growing contingent workforce. It's a broad based study looking at a number of issues related to the contingent...
The Emerging Gender Gap Favoring Women
Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education is a fascinating study by noted MIT economist economist David Autor and MIT PhD student Melanie Wasserman. They suggest that an emerging economic gender gap favoring women is...
The Growing Numbers of Not Working
The most recent BLS jobs report showed that almost 500,000 Americans left the workforce in March, resulting in the workforce participation rate falling to 63.3%. This is the lowest its been since 1979. There's a pretty active...
Making Serendipity Happen
Greg Lindsay's NY Times article Engineering Serendipity is a fascinating look at how companies are trying to increase the amount of serendipity that happens at their firms. It includes a good description of serendipity: The term, coined by...
Media is a Barbell Industry
Paid Content has an interesting article on media becoming a barbell industry. Barbell industry structures consist of a relatively few giant corporations on one end, a narrow middle consisting of a shrinking number of mid-sized firms,...
Word of Mouth is How Freelancers Find Jobs
It's not surprising that independent workers (freelancers, temps, self-employed, etc.) rely on word of mouth/referrals for getting business. What is a bit surprising is just how important word of mouth is compared to other methods. Survey data from...
What Working Parents Want in a Job
Pew Research's Modern Parenthood study examines the dramatic changes in how mothers and fathers spend their time that has occurred the past 50 years. Key quote from the study: Dads are doing more housework and child care; moms more paid work...
