How Gig Economy Help the Students Gain Practical Skills
Colleges and Institutes are intended to prepare students for their career but the curriculum is not enough to develop practical skills and make them financially independent until they get into the job. However, New Age Gig Economy helps students gain more practical skills and become financially independent.
What is Gig?
Gig Economy helps the student having skills that are relevant to the needs of the market. Gig means small projects or assignments, which can be done remotely or at the site. They are normally small in size and can be done in a limited period of time.
Not all the field of studies can afford to provide gigs but many of them have. HR, marketing, Finance, Software development, Electronics, IT, Telecom, Analytics, fine arts, languages etc. are some of the areas where students can expect to get Gigs.
Internships are important and give lots of options to students to learn and experiment but they have limited scope and limited timelines. Gigs are not a replacement for an internship; they are complementary to the internship process. They are more like live projects but students get paid for them.
While the student learns the core subject areas while performing gigs, they also get much more in terms of “Induction” to “world of work”.
Practical Skill lesson for students as Gig Economy Professionals are following -
Critical Thinking and Logic
The current education system is traditionally all about getting the right answer, rather than the process of experimentation. To keep up with a changing marketplace, gig workers get to learn critical and logical thinking. He gets the experience to view data, issues, and solutions.
Employeeship
While gig workers are independent contractors, they have to understand what a company needs from someone they hire. Employeeship is an important point to learn, how a good employee should behave in an organisation. In the gig economy, they get to know what a good professional looks like, how to work with others, managing by influencing others where they don’t have direct control but can influence them with their expertise. They can also observe how their gig supervisors are managing them and emulate those traits to be successful in the career.
Marketing
The gig economy professional gets to understand the need of the customers and communicate with them in a compelling way. As one can’t just focus on being good at delivering core product or service, you also have to be in charge of sales, branding, marketing, and new product development.
Communication
As with any other job, good communication is the key driver of success and failure in freelancing. Networking, pitching new business, working with different teams every day, and keeping clients up-to-date all require proactive and professional communication skills, which a gig economy professional get to learn throughout the working.
Time Management
When multiple projects all have back-to-back deadlines, staying sane means learning the secret of effective time management is what the key skill of gig economy professional
There are some marketplaces, which help students get gigs. Not just a student can be part of it, they are good for educational institutions also. If an institute gets register with these marketplaces, apart from enhancing their Brand value, they get custom analytics and statistics about their students, how many of them have done the internship and how many were involved in gigs or got placed. What work experience they got in terms of gigs. They will get reports that include stats like traffic from affiliated students by month, weekly traffic trends, and information about registrations. These institutes can use these metrics to add value to your students through targeted and data-driven educational programs on your campus.
