How many hybrid professionals are in the workforce?

Have you ever wondered how many hybrid professionals are in the workforce compared to experts or generalists?

Well, I've been wondering about this, and I might finally have a clue.

Here's the thing about quantifying how many hybrid professionals are in the workforce, it's like asking how many people in a room are parents or recent transplants to a new city. You can't tell by looking.

You have to:

• a) ask people, and

• b) they have to self-identify

Well, to put it simply, it's hard to measure.

At one point, I hypothesized that gig workers might be the closest proxy to hybrid professionals. The latest stat as of 2020 calculated "there are 64.6 million freelancers in the US, and their number is steadily growing. In around 40% of the US companies, one in four employees is a gig worker." (citation here)

I've used this figure in the back of my mind as an approximation for how large the population of hybrid professionals actually is. Again, it's not a perfect measure, but it gave me something to ponder. Until now...

How many people self-identify as a hybrid professional?

Recently, I was on Sid Meadow's Trend Report podcast, and he posted this LinkedIn poll and asked his audience what best describes them, singularity, multiplicity, or hybridity?

How did people respond?

Out of 90 votes (and counting) 66% self-identified as being a hybrid professional! (See below).

Whoa!

Now, of course this isn't scientific. It's sort of a random sample and it's biased because of Sid's network and followers on LinkedIn.

By any stretch of the imagination, this does not count as a statistically significant survey.

My analysis of what the poll reveals

Most of the people who commented on this post hadn't heard of hybrid professional identity before, so this was a new idea for them. They were intrigued and evaluated themselves for the first time.

I have to commend Sid because I believe the way he wrote the poll and added additional notations like "Singularity- the expert" was accurate and well worded.

Overall, I'm actually stunned. I did not expect two-thirds.

If you had asked me to guess how many people out of a group of 90 would self-identify as a hybrid professional, I would have said 55%, a little more than half.

The gears in my brain are going. How could I conduct a more scientifically sound way to measure this?

Concluding Thoughts

If the majority of workers believe they are hybrid professionals (both inside of companies and working on their own), but most of them don't know how to express this or articulate their hybrid value, then we have A LOT of work to do.

Hybrid professionals need to feel supported so they can be seen, valued, recognized, and managed to their highest potential.

Most of all, hybrid professionals want to know where they belong in their career path and how to explain that their disparate identities fit together.

We're creating a workforce that consists of people who are changing jobs, job titles, and roles more rapidly than at any time in history. With the accumulation of these multiple professional identities, of course more people are becoming hybrid in who they are at work. It's inevitable.

With the push to upskill, reskill, unlearn, and relearn to adapt to the changing needs of employers and companies, we are (unknowingly) creating a workforce of hybrid workers. It makes sense that more and more workers feel like square pegs in round holes when asked to label themselves as experts or generalists because they're neither.

For some reason, this one little unscientific poll has ignited a new level of urgency in me to GET THE WORD OUT.

We're working in an era where people can be experts, generalists, and hybrids. It's time to start training, recruiting, managing, and retaining workers based on qualities that support their hybrid work identity.

Structures designed only to support experts or generalists are outdated, insufficient, and are holding back a group of workers who are suffering from compartmentalizing who they truly are.