I am often asked what is the most popular professions are for freelancers and independent workers.
This is not as easy a question to answer as it seems. Independent workers serve all industries, work with both businesses and consumers and participate in pretty much every job type and profession.
They also tend to self-identify in very specific and often idiosyncratic ways. This makes grouping them into categories difficult.
As the studies chart below shows, the top three professions for these skilled independent workers are consulting, coaching, and research (17 percent), creative services (17 percent), and information technology (12 percent).
Other popular professions include education and training (9 percent), sales and marketing (8 percent), and healthcare and sciences (8 percent).
Although we’ve been tracking independent worker professions for over a decade, the categorization problems make it difficult to compare this data over time.
But a few patterns are clear.
Creative services, healthcare and sciences and project management have been fast growing fields for independent workers.
Information technology has grown, but not as fast as most would guess.
We think this is due in part to the changing nature of IT work. Some workers in project management and creative services likely would have self-described as IT workers a decade ago. But now things like web design and managing IT intensive projects are no longer viewed as IT work by many who do these kinds of jobs.
Professions with relatively fewer independent workers include finance and accounting and admin services. Automation is likely one of the reasons for this. Another reason is many working in finance identify as consultants.
Construction is also lower, which is true for the construction industry overall. It still hasn’t fully recovered from the Great Recession.
Since this data is based on a survey of independent workers who provide services to businesses, the list is dominated by highly skilled knowledge work categories.
But it’s important to note for reasons too long to go into here, those with lower incomes and/or working in lower skilled jobs tend to be underrepresented in most surveys, likely including this one.
Much more work needs to be done before we have definitive data on what professions are most popular for freelancers and independent workers. But the list above provides a solid estimate for skilled professionals providing services to businesses.