Insights Gathered from Interviews

Our public workforce development system is decentralized, giving workforce boards a great deal of discretion over how they deliver career services and connect jobseekers to training. No two workforce boards are alike, and this is true with respect to how they serve and interact with gig workers; workforce boards take different approaches to serving the gig workforce and have different comfort levels with doing so. Some boards, such as San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD), have been serving gig workers and freelancers for a number of years through a variety of programs, and continue to build on that experience. In many other cases, however, workforce boards feel they do not have a good understanding of how to serve gig workers and expressed an interest in learning from one another about best practices and innovative strategies. They also expressed a need for more information on what types of programs and services are most effective in serving gig workers.

MassHire workforce development professionals, for example, feel they lack sufficient knowledge to help people interested in entering gig employment. They reported struggling to understand how to navigate different gig economy job boards and, in turn, help jobseekers navigate those resources. Additionally, MassHire workforce development professionals said they lack the training and resources to help people start their own businesses.

Chicago Cook Workforce Partnership staff members were also eager to serve gig workers, but were not always sure of how to do so. For example, they noted that gig workers do not always meet eligibility requirements for programs because they are technically employed, just not at a traditional job. Partnership staff members lack certainty about whether they can serve these gig workers as self-employed business owners instead.

However, in cases where gig workers are looking to transition to more traditional employment, they would benefit from the same types of career services as traditional workers, such as career counseling. In Tyree’s case, a work-based learning opportunity, such as an apprenticeship, would allow him to earn a paycheck while learning to work with trains. Yet Tyree does not have a good sense of how to go about finding and securing an apprenticeship, and it is hard for him to set aside time to do research on this after the daily grind of just trying to earn enough money to pay bills. Tyree is someone who would benefit greatly from meeting with a career counselor who could help him navigate a career transition and find an apprenticeship. In order to provide these career services to gig workers, however, the workforce system needs enough staff on hand, and those staff members need sufficient time to provide the valuable individualized attention that has been shown to be effective in serving jobseekers.

The workforce development leaders and professionals I interviewed pointed to lack of data on gig workers as a significant challenge in serving this population. While many people are connected to the workforce system when they receive unemployment benefits, gig workers and people who are self-employed have traditionally been excluded from the unemployment system, putting them in the workforce system’s blind spot. Without data on who these workers are and what their employment and professional development needs are, workforce development professionals struggle to serve them. For example, it can be challenging to identify gig workers who would prefer to have a traditional job, who could benefit from services like career counseling, or who need assistance with transportation, housing, and child care (supports that in many cases only became more vital and harder to access during the pandemic). This lack of data also makes it a challenge for workforce development professionals to be proactive and conduct outreach to these gig workers.

The creation of Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) offered a unique opportunity by bringing more gig workers onto the radar of more workforce development professionals across the country. PUA, created in March 2020 as COVID-19 was driving up job losses, expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to groups of workers who had been excluded from traditional UI due to the nature of their employment, including people who are self-employed, part-time workers, and gig workers. In Missouri’s case, the influx of people applying for unemployment benefits during the pandemic brought hundreds of thousands of Missourians onto the workforce system’s radar, including gig workers. This gave Missouri’s workforce system an unusual opportunity. Workforce development professionals began targeted outreach to individual jobseekers, reaching out via phone and email in an effort to connect, build relationships, and talk about how the workforce system could help them. Missouri’s workforce system connected with about 35,000 jobseekers in the summer of 2020. Yet while the pandemic has provided more data on gig workers who could benefit from career services, PUA was a temporary program that ended in September 2021, so the lack of data on gig workers will remain a challenge into the future.

Communicating information to gig workers on how the workforce system can serve them is also a challenge, in part because many gig companies tend to be cautious about sharing information about training and professional development opportunities with their workforce, for fear of being accused of misclassification. Some gig companies, however, such as Postmates, have been willing to advertise these kinds of opportunities on their apps. In San Francisco, for instance, OEWD’s partner organizations, Jewish Vocational Services and Upwardly Global, have advertised career services to gig workers through the Postmates platform. A Postmates fleet member could go to their dashboard, see the services and resources offered by these organizations, and be connected to them. Some workforce boards have also advertised their services locally to the general public, but there is often no dedicated funding for marketing, so funds must be diverted from other sources. Unless workers are aware the workforce system exists, there may be a two-way lack of awareness and communication, making it less likely that gig workers will be able to take advantage of career services.

The Hunts Point Career Center, for example, located not far from the Soundview neighborhood where Tyree lives, offers a range of services that could benefit him, including career counseling and information on education and training programs. New York City’s Workforce1 Career Center System also offers a number of virtual career services in the pandemic. Yet Tyree has never sought help from the career center; he does not have a good sense of what services are available there and is busy working to earn enough each day to pay his bills, so he does not have time to look into this. The career center, for its part, may not have data on low-wage gig workers in the community like Tyree, or the means to reach out to this population.

In keeping with the GAO’s 2017 findings, workforce development professionals I interviewed said that lack of data on gig workers and people who are self-employed also makes it challenging for workforce boards to evaluate their efforts and report outcomes after they do serve this population. Gig workers and people who are self-employed are not included in unemployment data, which workforce boards use to track outcomes of the people they serve. Because of this, workforce development professionals must gather supplemental wage information to evaluate how well the workforce system performed for people in these groups. This requires more staff time to follow up with people individually and may result in incomplete or inaccurate data.

Data from 1099 tax forms, which gig workers typically use, could provide key information, but 1099 data is housed at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and is inaccessible to workforce boards. Nick Schultz, executive director of Long Beach’s Pacific Gateway Workforce Innovation Network, says there needs to be a policy discussion that brings together federal policymakers, states, and local governments to identify solutions to this challenge. Rather than building new data infrastructure, policymakers could remove data silos so existing data are more accessible. This could potentially be done, Schultz says, by using an application programming interface to pull 1099 data from the IRS to the U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL).

During the October 2021 gig worker focus group that Tyree participated in, he said that while his goal was to work with trains and potentially own his own business one day, working for Uber Eats is not helping him achieve that goal. This is true in the sense that Tyree is not learning about train mechanics while delivering food, but he is not giving himself enough credit. It is clear that while working for the Uber Eats app, Tyree has had to learn and sharpen his “soft skills,” the 21st century work skills that employers frequently say are valuable to them—things like time management, critical thinking, creativity, adaptability, and goal setting. Tyree should be able to tout those skills on LinkedIn and on all future job applications, but first he may need help understanding the skills he possesses and how they can help him reach his career goals.

Workforce boards in Long Beach and Missouri are already working to help gig workers understand how the skills and experience they have acquired can translate to other employment opportunities, including traditional employment opportunities. According to Mardy Leathers, director of Missouri’s Office of Workforce Development, job applications can be a challenge for gig workers. Job applications typically offer limited ways for gig workers to showcase their skills, and they may not know how to articulate their work experience in a way that easily connects to future job prospects.

What we hear from businesses is they want to hire people who have entrepreneurial spirit. It just goes to show that there are many transferable skills between the world of independent work and being an employee, and the better we can prepare people for both of those systems, the better. — Orrian Willis, Senior Workforce Development Specialist, San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development

Workforce development professionals at Missouri’s American Job Centers provide coaching to gig workers and other jobseekers on how to write resumes and help them find creative ways of displaying projects or tasks they have completed or skills they have mastered. This may involve using e-portfolios, though Leathers noted that even with e-portfolios, getting past the resume stage can still be difficult for gig workers. To deliver this type of coaching successfully, it is vital to have workforce development professionals in place who (1) are able to recognize a person’s talent and potential, and (2) have been trained on how to help that person articulate this talent to employers.

Across the workforce system, there is a heavy focus on complying with WIOA, including its funding restrictions, program eligibility requirements, performance benchmarks, and data reporting requirements. Serving gig workers does not always fit well into that rigid system.

For example, Orrian Willis, senior workforce development specialist with OEWD, notes that the services and resources OEWD has provided to gig workers are often outside the scope of the traditional workforce development that the WIOA-funded system was set up to deliver. Those services and resources are more typical of what one might find in a business development program at a college rather than at an American Job Center, and are not what WIOA’s formula funds were originally designed to support. Yet Willis noted that the number of Americans engaged in some type of gig work is projected to grow in the coming decade. As such, it is vital to consider how the U.S. can prepare people to confidently enter that kind of employment and the investments in our education and workforce systems that are needed to do so.

Another challenge is that WIOA’s metrics of success do not consistently align with gig work. According to Schultz in Long Beach, performance metrics do not fully capture things like labor market attachment, career advancement, and wage gains, all of which can happen for gig workers but across multiple projects or tasks rather than a single employer. He has been advocating for the performance metrics that govern WIOA funding to be adjusted to better support gig workers. Similarly, in Willis’s view, certain WIOA performance metrics—such as employment two or four quarters after exiting the WIOA system, for example—may not be compatible with the flexible, irregular nature of gig work. In Missouri, Leathers pointed to credential attainment and measurable skills gains as two performance metrics that may not be easily applicable to gig workers.

Local boards prefer to send people to nursing school, they prefer to send people to truck driving school because that’s what they know [will help them meet performance benchmarks] and that's what they're comfortable with. But that doesn’t then allow for on-demand flexibility to support someone who comes in, who may be a gig worker, and understand how to help that person. I think the system rewards that type of performance, and I think we’re worried to death about performance. — Mardy Leathers, Director, Office of Workforce Development, Missouri Department of Higher Education & Workforce Development

In San Francisco, OEWD changed its policy so it now accepts gig work as a successful employment outcome for people who complete WIOA-approved training programs. (If gig work is just a stepping stone to more traditional employment or other career aspirations, OEWD will keep people in the system until they reach those goals.) This policy change does not help OEWD meet its performance goals under WIOA, but OEWD felt it necessary to allow gig work to be counted as successful employment, because sometimes a person’s long-term career goal is gig work. Additionally, OEWD wanted to be able to recognize the employment or income gains for people who go on to do gig work, because ultimately OEWD wants to be able to understand and explain the outcomes and trajectories for people who use its services.

Many workforce development professionals feel the workforce system should help people who are interested in gig work prepare for entry into that type of employment. In their view, many people may not be able to work a traditional 9–5 job for a variety of reasons, such as caregiving responsibilities. Gig work offers those people a flexible way of earning an income. At the same time, many workforce development professionals are wary of gig work that is low-quality, exploitative, and lacks benefits. Indeed, it may not be an optimal use of resources for the workforce system to connect people to gigs like rideshare driving or food delivery that can be low-quality, particularly since app-based platforms typically have low barriers to entry anyway. Other forms of gig work, however, may fit into an individual’s desired long-term career path and would fall under the purview of the workforce system.

If there was a labor union that could represent gig workers, that labor union could be the conduit to training opportunities or upskilling. — Raija Vaisanen, Associate Director, Massachusetts Workforce Association

For instance, in Long Beach, Schultz sees a difference between rideshare driving or food delivery and other gig opportunities that allow a person to build and acquire transferable skills and have some individual bargaining power. In his view, workforce development professionals across the country need to accept gig workers as part of the labor force and be willing to serve them, particularly because many gig workers prefer this type of employment. Long Beach’s Pacific Gateway Workforce Innovation Network is focused on how the existing workforce development system can better serve gig workers, and is working to ensure the system is inclusive of and responsive to these workers.

I think the gig economy is a great opportunity for us because that’s what can help that worker be multidimensional, and helping someone be multidimensional should be our focus. And that may not necessarily mean a direct career path in the traditional sense. — Mardy Leathers, Director, Office of Workforce Development, Missouri Department of Higher Education & Workforce Development

In Missouri, Leathers says the pandemic has contributed to a significant shift in mindset among workforce development professionals. Moving forward, a core task will be to think about how the system can serve everyone. He noted that while the U.S. needs to find a way to expand benefits to gig workers, everyone should have the option to enter gig work if they want to, and gig workers may be able to make a good living. Whatever a person’s career goals, in his view, the workforce system’s job is to help them define those goals and achieve them so each person can become self-sufficient.