We work to live, but few of us live to work. Why is that? As long as we need an income to survive and build ourselves and our families up in the world, why not strive to do work that fills us with a sense of purpose?
Easy. Most of us don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Unless you’re a rare breed with a good dose of luck, privilege and/or opportunity, finding that “dream job” is the work of decades, if it happens at all.
That’s the simple reality of it, right?
At Zing, we’ve decided to take a hard, long look at that reality, acknowledge it, then turn our backs on it and see if we can’t break it into pieces.
What is work, anyway?
A lot has happened between now and the industrial revolution.
The idea that you need to show up at nine then leave no earlier than five is fast fading. Consider the rise of digital nomadism, where people travel the world, hopping from cafe to hostel, earning livable wages through remote work or finding local gigs..
Meanwhile, platforms like Upwork and Scripted enable freelancers to apply their talents around the world, and around the clock. At the same time, productivity systems like Slack and Asana change the way we communicate and organize our work.
Everywhere you look, work as we know it is evolving. But part-time employment seems a little stuck. We’re talking shift-based jobs like a dishwasher, bartender or line cook. There’s still an old code and routine that everyone seems to follow: apply for jobs, go through interviews, eventually (hopefully) find one.
Many people currently working part-time seems to view it as a stepping stone to the glory land: a full-time gig. Salary. Benefits. Consistency.
It is what it is… until it isn’t.
Part-time work is a huge opportunity
There is deep flexibility built into the part-time work world. Today, you might experience it as busy seasons and slow periods. Unpredictable surges of activity. Long stretches without action. Lots of churn for employers, lack of job security for employees.
We believe that there is magic to be found in this chaos. Zing seeks to create technology that captures this wild and unpredictable nature of part-time work, and harness it so that the highs and lows balance out. So that employers are way less stressed about scheduling and hiring, so that employees have the option to build something similar to a full-time living using only part-time work, or more meaningfully use their part-time experience to level up to the next stage in their dream career.
It is not possible today because of all the time wasted in between the actual shifts. The lack of consistency, the heavy burden on the employees to craft their whole story, job to job.
This is the space where Zing lives, the problem it seeks to solve. Our Purpose is to take this broken, outdated model of part-time work out of the industrial revolution playbook and remake it.
We hope you’ll join us on our journey.