The so-called New Work Order is on the rise. In other words, more and more people would rather work as freelancers than be employed - from anywhere. These trends are currently taking place in the labor market.
The corona pandemic has massively changed the labor market and continues to have an impact. After the shock of short-time work and the lockdown, home office and remote work have become normal for many people. The self-employed in particular no longer want to do without this flexibility. Highly qualified specialists in digital sectors in particular enjoy this freedom and more and more of them are entering the freelance market.
This is shown by several studies that are currently being published on the topics of remote work and self-employment. A look at the development of the labor market.
Freelance marketplace Malt estimates that there are six million highly qualified freelancers in Europe, of which more than half (3.4 million) work in digital professions. Overall, the marketplace saw a 39 percent increase in new registrations between 2021 and 2022. In professions that correspond to "rather classic job profiles", there is even a 63 percent increase. Around eleven percent of the newly registered freelancers last year were completely new to self-employment.
Vincent Huguet, co-founder of Malt, confirms that more and more companies are buying in the expertise they lack on the freelance market: "Companies were catapulted into the New Work Order and probably skipped ten to twenty years of transformation work in the process." The entrepreneur understands "New Work Order" to mean a working environment that is dominated by flexibility, autonomy and freelancing.
The management consultants at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), who conducted the market analysis "Freelancing in Europe" together with Malt, also found that the majority of self-employed people do not want to go back to employment: only three percent of the 3,334 respondents to the study said so to be actively looking for a permanent position.
A current study by the company freelancermap draws a similar picture. The project market has stabilized and nothing stands in the way of further growth, states Managing Director Thomas Maas. 69 percent of the freelancers surveyed for the study rate their financial situation as good or very good, only six percent rate it as bad or very bad. This corresponds to the BCG analysis, in which 87 percent of freelancers in Germany state that they are happy with their career situation overall.
In the BCG study, freelancers in Germany give the high degree of independence (91 percent) and flexible working hours (85 percent) as the decisive reasons for taking the step into self-employment. For around three out of four self-employed people (73 percent), the free choice of their place of work also plays a decisive role. Classic companies that want to retain their well-trained staff are reacting to the trend and are even remodeling their offices in some cases so that they can be used from home, as the "Handelsblatt" reported in the spring.
From the company's point of view, the prevailing shortage of skilled workers is a driving factor, because freelancers provide the required expertise without companies having to worry about the further training of their employees. In the ideal case, this creates a win-win situation for both companies and the increasing number of self-employed people, which cushions the ever-increasing pressure of the shortage of skilled workers through flexibility and autonomous working.
(This article was first published on Saturday 03 September 2022.)
