Well it was only about 4 weeks ago that we surveyed employees of Western Sydney because we became interested in a trend we were seeing in interviews that more and more people had “side hustles”…

We were fascinated by the results and we discovered back in those days (:-) ha ha). The main reason back in the day was all about fulfilment and personal development. We wrote a blog about it and when I reviewed it today my initial response was it was a bit irrelevant now but hey, iso won’t last forever and secondly whilst some of these positions don’t even exist some are just slightly adapted – think – my yoga instructor is still teaching us but she’s using zoom. I also thought it might give you food for thought as far as extra income or utilising the short courses the universities are offering up. Maybe you’ll come out of iso trained up with a new side hustle.

So, this is what we learnt about our people in Western Sydney a few weeks ago…

We interview over 100 job seekers a week and we’ve come across some very interesting entrepreneurs. We’ve met with Accountants who have limo businesses, a Digital Marketing Manager that makes bespoke furniture, an Executive Assistant/Interior Designer. We’ve had Recruitment Consultant/Bakers, Operations Managers/Wedding Singers, Financial Controllers/Studio Musicians.

More and more Australian’s are looking for a side hustle, whether it’s for personal fulfillment or satisfaction or to make some extra income. A recent report by NBN found that 80 percent of Australian’s are currently looking for fulfilment outside of work and that one in three of us admit to having made money over the internet.

We recently conducted a survey of our 65,000 job seekers and here’s what we found; Generation X were our biggest respondents with a side hustle at 35%, followed closely by Generation Y at 30%. No surprise here, although our lowest respondents with a side hustle were millennials at 19%. This could very likely be due to studying, part time positions and not identifying their additional job/s as side hustles but their main source of income.

Our biggest respondents were in Customer Service, Accounting followed closely by Digital and Tech.

We picked up a few ideas for side hustles ourselves; retail managers, basketball coaching, baking, digital marketing, cake decorating, and even a karaoke host, who doesn’t love a bit of karaoke, right?

Our Accountant side hustles were an interesting mix of; firefighters, volunteer work and business consultants followed by birthday decorators, what a fun side hustle!

Paula Brought an organisational psychologist from Griffith University said side hustles are, ‘to do with people wanting more in their life.’

Due to the internet, smartphones, ecommerce, peer-to-peer business models we are living in an age filled with opportunities.

I suspect side hustles are here to stay despite or even because of isolation.