Who is a freelancer? The answer may surprise you.

If you are familiar with the Digital work group and our panel study, you may know that we have interviewed over one hundred freelancers to better understand the digital marketplace and the gig economy. For the past two years, a large part of my role as a research assistant has been conducting these freelancer interviews and organizing their open-ended responses for data analysis. I have been exposed to a plethora of freelancer experiences. As a result of hearing and reading about the career paths of the freelancers we follow, I began to draw parallels between their work arrangements and my own work experience as an employee of the Digital Work Group. It makes me wonder: who can be considered an online freelancer? To unpack the characteristics of the freelancers we talked to, I examined their schedules, the typology of their work, and their stability/precarity. Though we asked them about almost everything under the sun (related to their work), these three aspects paint the picture of a freelancer’s characteristics.

Who is a freelancer?

With the rise of the gig economy, more people are participating in online freelance work. A freelancer is a person who is self-employed. By not being bound to a single contract or company, their earnings come from individual projects or tasks with varying clients. Contracts can be long-term or short-term, and monetary compensation can be hourly or project-based.

What are the characteristics of a freelancer?

Schedules

When we asked the workers we follow about their day-to-day online freelancing efforts, we heard about a range of unique schedules. A portion of freelancers use Upwork as their sole income and thus spend the majority of their day working on a project for a client or bidding for jobs. On the other end of the spectrum, some freelancers take on small, short jobs once a year. In fact, a few freelancers remarked that the only jobs they had ever completed on Upwork was our longitudinal study interview, meaning they had one 45-minute gig per year. Other freelancers work on Upwork as a “side hustle” in addition to their full-time or part-time job. To carve out time in their daily schedule for freelancing, they found time between appointments, before heading to work, or after they cooked dinner and tucked their kids into bed.

Typology of Work

When interviewing freelancers, we ask them if they have any prior work experience that contributes to their freelancing on Upwork. The range of responses further deepened the complexity of attempting to define a set of criteria for determining if a worker should be considered a freelancer. Freelancers mentioned previous in-person and task-based work, such as dog walking or Uber driving. They defined these gigs as freelance work because they provided income that supplemented their full-time job. Additionally, many participants also had a background in consulting. These high-skilled workers explain their experiences searching for clients and not necessarily belonging to a single company. These participant insights add new layers to determining the definition of a freelancer: gig workers can be task-based or knowledge-based, work can occur online and offline, and payment can be hourly or per project. Interestingly, we’ve seen countless freelancer arrangements that are hard to categorize: the type of worker, project, payment, and platform can create freelance experiences that are a “blend” between knowledge work, online work, and gig work

I must point out a crucial characteristic of all the freelancers we spoke to: they are all high-skilled workers, participating in the knowledge-based economy. Upworkers are remote freelancers, but remote freelancing is not always knowledge work (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk). Though my experience as a researcher was not analogous to non-academic gig work, it is similar to the academic nature of remote freelancers.

Stability and Precarity

As newcomers on Upwork joined the platform, many found it harder to get started than they anticipated. One freelancer expressed:

“I have submitted a lot of proposals, but I haven’t gotten a ton of work out of it. I know a lot of it has to do with me not being well-known on the platform as compared to other people. I’ve found several opportunities that seem to suit my skill set and background. I went through all the recommended steps of creating a profile, but I haven’t had as much success as I’d like.”

The freelancers we follow have described their job search on Upwork to be stressful, time-consuming, and daunting. They often wonder where their next paycheck will come from. For this reason, the majority of our participants seek out long-term clients to increase their sense of stability. There is a higher sense of stability for non-knowledge gig workers, such as Uber drivers, because there are avenues that they can take to find a higher demand from clients, such as working during specific times of day and locating to a populated city. Knowledge workers who are involved in long-term engagements also feel stability in their work. However, there is a substantial level of precarity for freelancers who have trouble landing a long-term job.

Am I a Freelancer?

I’ve learned so much about the differences between types of freelancers over the last two years, and I have been thinking about how my job arrangement is similar to an online knowledge worker. Specifically, I have been a researcher as a “side gig” for two years now. While my main priority was being a college student, I used my free time to contribute to the Digital Work Group. This means allotting a consistent time frame in my schedule to work, or devoting time before morning classes when a task needs my attention. The Digital Work Group meets entirely online, allowing me to work in different cities and countries at any hour of the day.

However, one key difference is the stability that coexists with my position on the team. I have a consistent number of hours I log per week, and I do not need to focus on searching for gigs. So, among the freelancers that I interviewed, I related to those who had long-term clients.

To some extent, I can compare my experience to all the freelancers that we spoke to, given that they are all knowledge workers on digital platforms. However, both knowledge-based and task-based gig workers rely on digital platforms in order to complete jobs. You could argue that both are under the umbrella term of online freelancing.

The freelancers who shared their experience with the Digital Work Team each have a unique work history, educational background, household arrangement, and identity. Freelancing has always encompassed a wide variety of workers, but the rise of digital gig work (both task and knowledge-based) has further broadened the criteria of people who fit into the freelancing definition.

Are you a freelancer?

After reading about just a fraction of freelancing characteristics and arrangements, what do you consider to be freelancing? Do your past jobs resemble the work of a freelancer?

If you have freelanced in the past or had a similar work experience, consider putting it on your resume. I advise this because in conducting our research, a trend emerged: online freelancers typically do not include their gig work experience in their resumes or LinkedIn profiles. However, there are various benefits to having an updated LinkedIn status. So, try including that position on your resume and framing it in a manner that is receivable to employers.

Written by Heba Salman
Special thanks to Clea ONeil for her edits.