The Pixelated Workforce Comes To Life
New and integrative ways to work and choose careers
Welcome to this edition of my newsletter! This week we cover:
The Pixelated Workforce
Workplace and Career News
Reflections On 1 Year of Entrepreneurship
Let’s dig in
👤1.The Pixelated Workforce Comes to Life👤
Back in 2019, HR Analyst Josh Bersin produced research on a concept he called the “pixelated workforce.” His core thesis was around how as a result of the gig economy, talent marketplaces, side-hustles and alternative forms of work, the nature of the relationship between employers and employees were changing.
Instead of full-time employment being seen as the holy grail, there was a shift in the mindset of employees around options for how to work, and what we constitute as work based on our skill, location, age and lifestyle. Almost 40% of Americans now had part-time or contingent jobs, and almost 2/3 of young people also have side-hustles, and at the time, to the latest study by Upwork and a similar study by MBO partners, 42% of people under the age of 35 were now freelancers.
While Josh wrote about this in 2019, the trend hasn’t slowed down. By one estimate, before the pandemic hit, 48% of workers had been involved in the gig economy at some point. By 2024, that number is projected to rise to 53%.
Josh chose the word pixelated, to represent pixels, the smallest unit of a digital image that can be displayed. According to Gloat, “Much like graphics can be broken down into pixels, each workforce can be deconstructed into smaller pieces, whether that’s sub-divisions, teams, employees, or even individualized projects and tasks.”
Instead of trying to cobble together a full-time role with an endless list of skills and responsibilities, a hiring manager could simply act as a “talent agent,” and identify the work that outcomes+output of what needs to be done, and the discrete tasks and workstreams that need to be completed, and then look toward who might be able to do those things. These individuals, could be inside of their organization, outside of it.
Pixelated work is possible within corporate America because of the companies and technology that are here today that makes it a possibility. Companies like Roleshare, which provide a platform for companies looking to staff mid-senior level roles along with fractional talent who want more flexible allow for more options for diverse talent to work in a pixelated manner.
Companies like Braintrust, which is a blockchain enabled talent platform for highly-skilled workers match these highly skilled workers on fractional projects with Fortune 500 companies. Powered by the blockchain, each worker also has ownership rights and a stake in how the platform is governed.
While in these cases, both of these companies serve more senior and experienced pixelated professionals, Passion Fruit is building a freelance platform and educational model for Gen Z professionals who want to build freelance careers.
A Team, takes a “team based’ approach to sourcing pixelated talent, and allows enterprises who hire them to not just hire an individual freelancer but a team of them (Ex: software engineer, designer, product manager) for contract based work.
While pixelated work is starting to become common in the enterprise space, it’s even further along in the entrepreneur, solopreneur and freelancer world.
Over the past year as an entrepreneur, I’ve met numerous other employees and entrepreneurs who have embraced the idea of the pixelated workforce. Here are a few examples:
A bookkeeper, who works 20 hours a week, manages a rental property and picks her kids up from school each day
An Executive Coach who also works as a yoga instructor, and travels for 2 months out of the year across the globe
A former startup founder + product marketer who now runs a web3 education community,
And of course, everyone’s favorite software engineer who works 10 remote software engineering jobs
When I talk to these individuals, many of them talk about how they have diverse interests and skills, some of which they use in their core job or work, but many which they didn’t. They’ve embraced pixelated work, or a portfolio career, to get the same kind of ends that a full-time job would have given them, but just through a different set of “means.” To them, this allowed for a more exciting, engaging, flexible way of choosing work and career approach that worked for them.
We are still in the early innings of what the pixelated workforce could be, but w the changes and transformation for the future of work is not just about work, but about the transformation of work, workplace, and workforce. This has many implications for leaders, organizations and employees, ranging from how we hire, who we hire (employers+leaders) and and perhaps more importantly, how employees navigate choices and decisions around careers, work, education, and learning. It’s an exciting time to watch this evolve right before our eyes.
2.📣 Workplace and Career News 📣
Article: Roleshare Raises $1.2M Seed - Roleshare, a job sharing marketplace and management platform, announced a $1.2 million. Roleshare’s platform allows companies to retain and redeploy diverse talent by matching people with complementary skills to share mid to senior roles. Itn addition to having enterprises, it also has a platform of employees interested in fractional talent opportunities to share roles, especially those looking for more flexibility
Podcast: Unsucking The Workplace Through Connection - This was a good interview with Airtable’s Jessica Amortegui, Head of Talent Development. During the interview, Jessica talked about the work they are doing to improve connection in a primarily remote-virtual workplace, along with specific tools they are providing managers and leaders to use to improve connection and engagement on their teams.
Article: How Short Form Education Helps Learners Make Career Transitions - Short Form Online Programs (SPOCS) produced by companies like Emeritus (cited in the article) and ExecOnline are often seen as upskilling programs for employees. While these companies have a B2B enterprise model, they also partner with institutions to offer these short-courses to students. This article details one employees’ decision to enroll in a 6-month bootcamp on Product Management, and how she thinks it helped her achieve a new career outcome. If bootcamps and SPOCs can help people like Christina land a job at Spotify, they might start to generate more interest both as a talent retention/upskilliing tool (HR + L&D) or a career accelerator for employees.
Article: Why The Career Of The Future Needs a Portfolio Approach (Charterworks/Time) - I wrote about portfolio careers previously and even did a Linkedin post on it this week, but this article goes in depth about how portfolio careers concept is picking up especially for people who are see themselves as being multi-skilled or dimensional want to bring those elements to life not in one day job, but perhaps in multiple ways.
Article: The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score (NY Times) -
The phrase “what gets measured get’s managed” takes on a whole new form of meaning in productivity tracking software. The comments section is wild (be warned..)
3.⚒️ Reflections On 1 Year as an Entrepreneur ⚒️
Today, I hit my one year anniversary of being an entrepreneur, something I am grateful to celebrate. The decision to strike out on my own was about pursuing a goal and interest in creating a life and career that worked for me. While I appreciated and am grateful for everything working in a corporate job gave to me, after studying the future of work and the new models of creating a career and life I couldn’t resist the opportunity to give it a try.
Furthermore, for almost a decade, I was one of those side-hustlers building something quietly on the side. While working a side hustle on top of a full-time job gave me more avenues to pursue interests and opportunities, it also made me wonder if there was another way to bring more of what I was doing outside of work to life. Entrepreneurship gave me a chance to do that, and to not only create a life I want for myself, but to be able to do things each day that I enjoy doing.
I wrote some reflections on what I’ve learned as an entrepreneur over the past year that you can read here, but one lesson that I’ll share that is relevant to this week’s newsletter is that when
When I first started thinking about moving to the solo-path, I thought of entrepreneurship as a pathway, very much like corporate had a “path.” I’m starting to see entrepreneurship more as a toolkit, that, when you learn the various tools, allow you to use them in ways to create the life and career that you want.
As I think about the future of work, I think teaching these tools is really important, to create work and workplaces that work for more people. For me, entrepreneurship is the toolkit that fuels choice and agency, and that allows me to bring my strengths and talents to life through work in diverse and commercially viable ways.
Think of your life as a business, and entrepreneurship as the tool that allows you to have different “business units” or “product lines.” Over time, just like a business evolves, so does your life, and thus your product lines change. Entrepreneurship is the toolkit that enables that.
PS - 1 year of entrepreneurship also means 1 year of writing this newsletter. Thank you to those of you who are reading this and for your support along this journey. I’d love to hear what you think or if there are topics you’d like me to cover, feel free to reply in the comments or shoot me an email directly (alex dot dea at gmail dot com) or connect with me on LinkedIn
Have a great week!