Flex-job popularity sign of changing economy?

FINDING WHAT WORKS: Laura Boucher, left, a 23-year-old Providence resident, recently took a part-time, flexible position working overnight shifts at Bradley Hospital 20 hours a week. / PBN PHOTO/CONNIE GROSCH
FINDING WHAT WORKS: Laura Boucher, left, a 23-year-old Providence resident, recently took a part-time, flexible position working overnight shifts at Bradley Hospital 20 hours a week. / PBN PHOTO/CONNIE GROSCH

Laura Boucher is a 23-year-old registered nurse with the goal of having a full-time job, preferably at Bradley Hospital, because of its focus on mental-health care for children and adolescents.
Since Boucher hasn’t been offered that full-time position yet, she’s willing – even eager – to take steps toward her goal by accepting an offer to work at the East Providence hospital in a part-time, flexible position from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. for 20 hours a week, a schedule rounded out from 24 hours one week and 16 hours the next.
A six-week residency at Bradley through a six-month program called Passports to Practice convinced Boucher this work was her goal. Through the same Passport to Practice program, she’s just starting a five-week residency, working two full days a week, in medical-surgical nursing at The Miriam Hospital in Providence.
“After I start work at Bradley on March 4, my goal will be to manage both Bradley and Miriam for two-to-three weeks,” said Boucher. “The part-time job at Bradley gives me time to see more of the medical-surgical side of nursing at Miriam and finish the Passport to Practice program.”
Boucher’s irregularly structured work style, particularly in health care, is one of many that put Providence among the top seven cities in the U.S. for the most positions available in the 10 highest-in-demand categories of flexible jobs, according to a study by Boulder, Colo.-based FlexJobs.com, an online service for professionals seeking telecommuting, flexible schedule, part-time and freelance jobs.
“From our perspective, it means we think Providence is open and amenable to have people work in different ways. The old way of nine-to-five doesn’t work for some companies,” said Brie Reynolds, director of online content and author of a flexible jobs blog for FlexJobs.
Research by FlexJobs found that the positions job seekers searched for most during 2013 were topped off by nursing, followed by data entry, marketing, writer, Java developer, editor, project manager, sales, accounting and customer service. The list was compiled by FlexJobs through analysis of data from keyword searches. In addition to Providence, the cities with the most-flexible positions available in these high-demand categories are New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Denver and Cleveland.
While Boucher’s flexible job in nursing is her choice to take her toward her goal, flexibility is not always a first choice.
“I think the increase in flexible jobs is a double-edged sword, in some respects,” said Rick Brooks, executive director of the Governor’s Workforce Board.
“It offers flexibility for workers who want to work part time, perhaps because of family or other commitments,” said Brooks. “The other edge of the sword is that it may mean workers are employed without having access to benefits. Some people are working more than one part-time job to have a full-time income with no access to benefits.
“For businesses, it’s often the case that part-time workers provide more flexibility to be available when the need increases,” said Brooks.
Flexible and part-time work is likely impacted by the skills gap, with employers struggling to fill positions which have a shortage of appropriately-trained workers, said Brooks.
“If a small business has a need for social media expertise, that may not be a full-time job,” said Brooks. “For someone who has that kind of skill to offer, they may have to have multiple jobs or be self-employed.
“It does strike me as indicative of the new economy and the changing workforce system that some of these skills don’t translate neatly into permanent employment in the workforce system,” said Brooks.
In health care, the concept of the Passport to Practice nurse-residency program for newly licensed, registered nurses is to provide training that helps lead to full-time employment or a step up the career ladder, said Alaina Johnson, executive director of the Stepping Up program, which collaborates with the Rhode Island Action Coalition on the program. In the case of nursing, those residencies which may lead to part-time or full-time jobs are often successful in getting a foot in the door.
“We now have 17 nurses enrolled in the program and 11 have jobs,” said Johnson. “They’re getting placed in hospitals, behavioral-health centers, long-term-care facilities and in-home care. They’ve been getting scooped up left and right and the program isn’t over until the end of March.”
Medical and health care jobs comprise the biggest category in the flexjobs.com listings, said Reynolds.
FlexJobs’ Providence-area ranking, which includes some positions in Warwick posted on the FlexJobs site, doesn’t directly correlate to Rhode Island having the nation’s highest employment rate – 9.1 percent in December. The ranking is simply by the most jobs available in those popular categories, said Reynolds.
Some jobs posted on the site were listed directly by employers, while others were picked up from other websites, said Reynolds. The FlexJobs staff hand-screens each posting to make sure the company is legitimate and the job is available, said Reynolds.
Job seekers pay $14.95 per month, $29.95 for three months or $49.95 per year to use the flexjobs.com site.
FlexJobs, however, doesn’t call all the employers before posting the jobs.
In fact, three local employers, Lifespan, MetLife and BatchBlue Software, that had flexible positions available in Rhode Island listed on flexjobs.com told Providence Business News they didn’t know their job openings were posted on the online job aggregator. “They didn’t call us, but they’re sending quite a bit of traffic to our website,” said Ray Anderson, chief technology officer for Providence-based BatchBlue, which has developed a Batchbook product that’s a cloud application to help businesses manage customer relationships.
Anderson knows which Web traffic is from flexjobs.com because he reviewed the analytics resulting from the three job postings when he got the phone call from PBN.
“I never heard of them until they appeared in my analytics,” he said. “I think FlexJobs must have picked up our position from Stack Overflow.”
Stack Overflow is an online question-and-answer site for professional and amateur programmers where BatchBlue posted its most critical need, that of a full-time Ruby on Rails software engineer.
Flexible job listings could be one way to fill positions remaining vacant because of the skills gap in the Ocean State, and while it may help companies within the state grow, it may not be the best way to employ Rhode Islanders.
“Our company is very well-situated to support remote workers, so when we have a job opening we post it both locally and remotely,” said Anderson. “These are full-time jobs with benefits, including five weeks of vacation.
“We have employees from Portland, New York and Connecticut. We have an employee from Providence who comes in about once a week,” said Anderson. “There are a lot of tools that tear down the requirement to be in the same room.”
Boucher, for her part, is excited to be taking a step toward what she hopes will be full-time work.
“I know this is a good fit for me because it integrates psychology and pediatrics,” she said of the Bradley Hospital opportunity. She starts her part-time job, with benefits, at Bradley on March 4, with the possibility of picking up additional shifts.
“I had a minor in psychology at college and I have a passion to work with children,” she said. •

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