Pip Jamieson - Founder The Dots
Jimmy interviews the Founder and CEO of the Dots, Pip Jamieson.
The Dots is a platform over over half a million 'no collar workers', these people can include those in the creative industries and the wider technology sector.
There are 10,000 companies on the platform using it to hire people.
Prime Ministerial briefing
Prime Minister, this week, we met with a fascinating company which is creating the modern-day rails for the creative economy and more broadly what they term no-collar workers
It has half a million members on the platform, 40% of whom are freelancers. they are predominantly coming together to work on creative side projects and they are seeing a surge of freelancers as people pursue side projects, partly as a result of the pandemic.
There are also 10,000 companies on the platform using it to hire people.
Unsurprisingly in the last few months, they have seen competition for applications increasing across the board.
Equally there has been a rise of remote working applications and opportunities, which is leading to a democratisation for those not living in metropolitan hubs- we heard a similar theme from Hayden Wood at bulb last week.
They are seeing an increase of the multi-disciplinary individual, sometimes referred to as T shaped skill set or even colloquially as a ‘slashie’.
Furthermore, they are seeing the rise of skill swappers, a trend where people are trading their time and skills in exchange for being taught skills in other areas, for example an accountant or lawyer may offer their time to a start up project in exchange for learning about more creative design and vicer versa. They are seeing this increase at round 50% month on month increase, therefore this is now 25x what it was last year.
When building The Dots, Pip referred to four golden skills of product, which are management, engineering, design and data - they have upskilled interns in these areas who are now full team members.
Technology firms are increasing their hiring on the platform, but not just in technical skills such as engineering, they are also seeing a significant rise number of copywriters and producers for example.
Even in technical roles the importance of creativity is becoming more important, and this is a trend The Dots are likely to see increasing until Quantum technology comes in.
I may provide a separate note on Quantum technology, that would be written by someone with lots of PhDs, although I am hoping that we will get a guest on at some point to talk about the impact of Quantum computing soon, because it is truly mind boggling.
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