10 Predictions for 2023: No. 8 - Career Diversification Goes Mainstream

Fewer workers will rely solely on one employer, who doesn’t really care about them.

Jan 16, 2023

(I’m making 10 predictions for 2023. Find the links to my others at the bottom of this post.👇🏿 )

Earlier this month, TechCrunch wrote about how laid-off tech workers were navigating their careers after losing their jobs. The first pseudonymous user they spoke to, who spoke openly about taking back control over their career, was fascinating:

Aaliyah was laid off from her tech job in the spring. Just one month earlier, she had a positive review with her boss and was promised a raise with more stock options.
The layoff thus came as a surprise. And unlike some of her colleagues, who put their names in spreadsheets and jumped back into the job hunt, Aaliyah took a few weeks to think. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in tech. I wasn’t sure I wanted to work for anyone,” she said.
“I had to make a decision in terms of what I want my day-to-day life to look like financially. Am I going to hustle or do I just want to take what falls into my lap?” she said on the phone. “After a couple of weeks, I felt like I’m ready to take more control back as opposed to just letting people kind of sway me one way or another.”
Currently, Aaliyah works two full-time tech jobs — neither company knows — and she runs a consultancy business on the side. While many people work multiple jobs to make ends meet, the opportunity to work multiple full-time jobs in tech has been amplified by remote work and layoffs. In fact, over 39,000 people are in the Overemployed Discord community, which is self-described “as a community of professionals looking to work two remote jobs, earn extra income, and achieve financial freedom. Be free from office politics and layoffs.”
“Never again am I going to put myself into a position where I’m dependent on one stream of income from one company that may or may not do what’s in my interest,” Aaliyah said. “They’re gonna do what they want, and I’m going to do what’s mine.”

I predict that in 2023, we’ll see a dramatic increase in people explicitly “diversifying” their careers. This means more workers than ever will seek:

✅ Multiple sources of income

✅ Multiple personal and professional brands

✅ Multiple organizational affiliations

✅ More side hustles

✅ Multiple “main hustles”

Fewer workers will rely solely on one employer, who doesn’t really care about them.

While this movement will go mainstream in 2023, I believe this trend actually started during the pandemic, as the universal normalization of remote work gave office workers much more control over their time. The most productive workers asked themselves why they were trading their money for time instead of their output. Many started to moonlight. Many of those side gigs became main gigs, and we saw the birth of online communities like Overemployed.

But 2022, and the current knowledge-work-job market, added a new dimension. More than 150,000 people were laid off globally in tech last year. Many of those people worked at the world's most high-paying, prestigious, and coveted companies, the same companies that many believed were insulated from layoffs and the turbulence of business cycles.

So while this “career diversification” trend may have begun as workers taking advantage of their undervalued time, it will be supercharged by workers playing defense against the overreliance on a single job.

In 2023, career diversification goes from niche movement to mainstream.

One caveat: This will be hard to track. People working multiple full-time jobs are unlikely to be open about it. The data won’t show up on LinkedIn, and it might be hard to tease it out of government data.

I wrote about this in November as tech layoffs dominated the headlines:

There's never been a more critical time to have a "diversified career."
Stripe, one of the most successful and valuable private, venture-backed companies, just laid off 14% of its staff.
Twitter, the most culturally relevant social network in the Western world, just laid off 50% of its staff.
Facebook / Meta, home of the world's largest social network, with more than 87,000 employees, is poised to announce its first mass layoffs in its nearly 20-year history.
Thousands of people, employed by some of the most exclusive and prestigious employers, suddenly "jobless" through no fault of their own.
There's never been a better time to have more than one source of income.
The companies that laid people off did what they needed to do to survive. People should proactively do the same.

I’m making 10 predictions for 2023. Read my others below.

Jamaal’s Letter

10 Predictions for 2023: No. 8 - Career Diversification Goes Mainstream

Fewer workers will rely solely on one employer, who doesn’t really care about them.