'Out of the rat race': Gen Z side hustlers carve a niche for themselves amid tough Asia-Pacific job market

More than 500 million Gen Z workers, aged between 18 and 26, are now poised to enter the Asia-Pacific labour market, a seismic shift in workplace demographics just as the nature, meaning and compensation of work are pulled apart, scrutinised and reassembled for the AI age.

Pinched by inflation, with choices chiselled out by the pandemic, they have become a generation of "side hustlers".

They are content makers, e-commerce entrepreneurs and food-truck owners, harnessing technology to work multiple jobs and creating niches as they look for new skills, an extra buck and a glimpse of economic freedom.

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For members of Gen Z, there is no "job or life" and they face a sometimes-depressing daily blizzard of warnings over the likely costs of fast-ageing societies; tapering welfare provision and the risks - as well as rewards - of the revolution of work promised by artificial intelligence (AI).

While financial need is a big driver for most - especially as inflation knocks up the prices of food, phones and accommodation - money alone is not the motivation.

"A lot of Gen Zs now look at a side hustle almost as part of their actual career path itself," said Singapore career strategist Adrian Choo.

A recent survey by audit firm Deloitte found that 46 per cent of Gen Zs said they had a second job in addition to their full-time one.

That is partly because they were tipped into a tumultuous job market during the pandemic.

"I think [Gen Z] is graduating during a very tough time from [university] right now, because of inflation and how ridiculous living costs are," said Santor Nishizaki, a Los Angeles-based organisational leadership expert. "A lot of them actually started a side hustle during the pandemic just to meet living expenses."

Of almost 15,000 Gen Zs surveyed from across 44 countries by Deloitte, 35 per cent of them said they worried most about the cost of living, with 51 per cent of respondents saying they lived from pay cheque to pay cheque.

But there are risks to the side-hustle culture: overwork, stress and the varying competence and commitment that can follow becoming a jack of all trades.

The law may also not always be on the side of the side hustler.

"It's quite common for employers to include in their contracts that employees cannot be engaged in other businesses," said Wendy Wong, employment lawyer at Simmons & Simmons in Hong Kong.

"So I think for those young people, it's quite important for them to actually check contracts ... just to make sure that they are in compliance and are not breaching anything."

This Week in Asia spoke to the region's side hustlers to find out their hopes, fears and determination to make work, work for them.

For five days a week, Meg Rutherford is a commercial lawyer, but come the weekend she styles children aged four to 14 at "pamper parties".

The 26-year-old has worked as a lawyer for two-and-a-half years, and has been working at a mid-sized law firm in Christchurch, New Zealand, for a year. But after buying a house with her partner last year, she felt the financial burden begin to weigh heavily.

"Things are more expensive now than ever, and, no doubt, buying a house increased our expenses, even if it was for the better," she said.

"The thought of looking for more income was also just spurred on by the fact that we are going into a recession and things are just so uncertain at the moment."

Rutherford reached out to an old employer who used to organise pamper parties for children.

When the employer told her she had stopped the business, Rutherford took a punt on starting it up on her own.

"I thought to myself, 'I could do that'," she said. "It wasn't that expensive to set up, and I already had some experience doing it before, so it made sense to start it up again as my own business."

Rutherford launched an Instagram page to promote her pamper-party business in March, offering at-home manicures, pedicures, hair styling and other services to children between the ages of four and 14.

Social media was the hook for anyone starting a new business, Rutherford said, and had been a crucial tool to expand her reach.

"I can advertise that I'm doing these pamper parties but unless someone gets a visual of what I offer through photos and social-media posts, then it is quite hard to get people to engage with you," she said.

"For me, school was not the priority," said Singaporean final-year business student Chang Cho Yew, 24. "I wanted to venture out and do something by myself."

And so PropUp was born, a firm that produces promotional real-estate videos.

PropUp was not the first idea he landed on with his partners, Chang said, but after several setbacks and failed attempts, they finally found something that stuck.

"We are a real-estate video production company today but when I started the company, we were trying to do other things like [leveraging] virtual reality in marketing," he said, adding that it had taken a long time to carve out a niche for himself.

One of the toughest challenges for Chang was having to juggle his studies and work, which resulted in his grade point average taking a hit, prompting him to consider taking a year-long leave of absence from school.

But Chang backed himself to make a good go at his business, not only for the extra income but also as a step up the ladder in the city state's competitive job market.

"I got myself out of the rat race. I got myself out of competing with a bunch of undergraduates fighting for the same job," he said. "There is always money out there, as long as you can communicate with people and you can sell."

Now Chang does not want to stop at PropUp and he has several new business ideas. And he said those meant he might even drop out of school.

A drama teacher at a secondary school in the Indonesian city of Bandung, 25-year-old Rizky said his real passion lay elsewhere.

"I wanted to do a job in something creative and use my (visual arts) degree," he said.

But after receiving job rejections for graphic-design roles for almost a year, he decided it was time to switch gears and find a steady income. He got a job at a local secondary school, teaching theatrical arts.

"My father has passed away, and my mother makes a small income from a food-catering business," Rizky said, requesting to go by his first name, as secondary employment is discouraged at his workplace.

"I need to have a stable salary to help my family, and especially to help pay for my sister's schooling."

But to make sure his first love was not lost, Rizky started taking on freelance graphic-design jobs on websites like Fiverr and Upwork, getting paid US$10 to US$30 to design fliers and logos and create illustrations.

Rizky earns around 3 million rupiah (US$200) a month from his teaching job. Although freelancing jobs come intermittently, Rizky said that even a little extra money every month went a long way.

"The prices of everything seem to be going up more and more lately," he said.

During school breaks, Rizky takes on freelance work and also pitches in at his friend's wedding-photography business.

While that full-time graphic-design job remains elusive, Rizky has not given up, his career hopes delayed but not denied.

"I'm happy it is still part of my life in some way," he said.

Malaysian Joshua Bartholomew is 22 and dreams of becoming a singer-songwriter. For now, he plays covers, interspersed with his original songs, at small festivals, pubs, and the occasional wedding.

But for his 9-5, he works as a sales representative at a music store in Kota Kinabalu, the capital city of Sabah state in Malaysian Borneo.

Being able to pursue his own music as a side hustle is both fun and, to some extent, financially rewarding.

"Passion is part of it and to earn extra pocket money ... It pays some of my bills so I won't go broke," he said.

However, he admitted that the rush to prepare for gigs after work could get tiring, especially as he had to handle everything from promotions to soundchecks mostly on his own, but felt it was worth it if it could help bring his music to a broader audience.

Bartholomew said social media had also been an indispensable tool to secure gigs and to promote his songs and videos of past live performances to build a following.

But he does not think his very literal side gigs will replace his day job any time soon.

"I can see myself doing it more often in the future, but honestly I wouldn't consider this as a full-time job," Bartholomew said.

When Singapore was in the middle of the pandemic, Vanessa Neo, 28, and Calvina Thenderan, 27, decided to step out of their comfort zone and try something new: starting their own online homeware business.

The two friends met at a multinational firm as colleagues, and when Neo pitched the idea of working together on a homeware business in 2021, Thenderan agreed. After months of market research and preparation, they launched Hom in April last year.

Hom is still developing, but the young entrepreneurs have started to partner other brands and appear in pop-up stores.

Throughout, Neo continued her day job as a global category expert, and Thenderan as a business controller. It has been a tough balancing act.

Both of them struggled to juggle their various responsibilities, resulting in burnout, said Thenderan.

"It was a bit of a shocker because our corporate jobs became a lot more intense in the past year or so and that was when we also started Hom," she said, adding that the two had to sacrifice time on hobbies and with family and friends as a result.

They then decided to take this experience in their stride and channel it into something positive.

Neo said they had since started sharing "#WellnessWednesday" posts on the company's Instagram page and collaborated with a mental health association in Singapore, donating S$1 of each sale to the association.

For them, the business is a passion project and a way to feed their entrepreneurial spirit, but there are currently no plans to make Hom their full-time jobs.

"There are a lot of things to think about like when your passion becomes your main job, then it definitely takes the fun from it," Neo said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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