Dr. Maurice Mazerolle, Associate Professor, Department of Human Resources Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University DISRUPTING THE SHARING ECONOMY-OR ELSE! TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT

Provider Skills Needed for the Sharing Economy ■Scale. Training needs to be delivered to tens of thousands of workers in different cities and countries around the world. This immediately affects the choice of available instructional design, production methods, technology systems, and data analysis tools. Onboarding – Branding ■Millenials. Many sharing economy workers are young, mobile, and grew up with services like YouTube and Instagram. When it comes to training, they expect high quality content that is easily accessible on- the-go

Skills Needed for the Sharing Economy Cont’d ■Contractor Status. Because sharing economy workers are legally independent contractors, most companies are wary of 'requiring' training activities that are typically reserved for employees. Community managers must therefore create an experience where workers voluntarily choose to participate in training. To make things even more challenging, this training is often critical to setting expectations and ensuring trust, safety, and quality in the marketplace. ■Competition. Workers have an unprecedented number of choices when it comes to the companies they will drive, deliver, and perform other services for. Operations and community leaders can build brand loyalty by offering educational resources and skills development opportunities that will help workers be even more successful on the platform and in their daily lives.

Skills Needed for the Sharing Economy Recommendations ■Use self-paced, mobile-friendly, and bite-sized content. Your audience will likely be consuming content over several time periods and on multiple devices. Giving extra attention to your instructional design and delivery will pay long-term dividends in engagement and retention. ■Develop agile content capabilities. Your platform and policies will likely be changing over time. Bite-size materials that you can quickly update and maintain will enable you to manage and swap content much more flexibly. Courses based on written content, Powerpoint movies, screencasting, and in-house animations will generally enable you to iterate faster than live action video. Closed captions for video are also a quick way to support multiple languages without having to create new courses from scratch.

Recommendations Cont’d ■Provide incentives. Sharing economy workers are generally not required to take your training. In many cases, offering a certificate of completion isn't an exciting incentive. Consider the use of points, badges, and gift rewards to drive higher engagement with training. For example, give workers a highly visible profile badge for completing their onboarding training. This is particularly effective for new workers who don't have a history of reviews, and may otherwise be discouraged from joining your already thriving community. ■Remember your advanced users. Sharing economy businesses usually begin to scale their community in the onboarding process. But your star workers are providing disproportionate benefits to your business, and your underperforming workers are creating negative experiences that could harm your brand. Consider providing advanced topics to help your star workers get even more value from the platform, and offering remedial training for the underperformers.

Supplier Skills for Freelancers to Succeed in the Sharing Economy ■Cultivate relationships. While most of us can’t expect and don’t want our gig work to turn into full-time commitments, we can leverage those relationships as stable sources of income. Do right by your clients, stay in touch and you can expect to be hired by them again. ■Diversify. Every experienced professional knows that you have to be more than a one-trick pony to keep the work coming in. Freelancers need to focus on expanding their list of services.

■Avoid the race to the bottom. You must charge the rate you want (and need) to earn, even when others are willing to take less because there will always be clients willing to pay for quality. ■Anticipate your client’s pain points and offer service to remedy them. When you know who you want to work for, you can anticipate their needs and tailor your services to fill the gaps in the existing marketplace

■Set a schedule that works for your life. The standard 9 to 5 doesn’t fit everyone’s lifestyles, life demands, or ability. Freelance work gives people the opportunity to construct a schedule that works for the way they want or need to do life. Take advantage of it. There will always be trade-offs and if you are opting for the slightly less secure piecemeal employment, take advantage of its perks and work the hours that work for you