Employees used to go to work and then come home. Now, they commonly go to one job and then to another. 

It’s called parallel work, and it essentially means taking on multiple jobs as opposed to having a single full-time position. That’s different from just having a side gig in addition to a full-time one; it’s also different from fractional work, wherein senior-level employees work a fraction of full-time hours for a variety of clients. 

Parallel work means having literally two jobs at once—they could even be two full-time roles at the same company, or maybe even working in an entirely different career on top of your existing one. 

While it sounds offbeat, it provides extra income streams and professional opportunities in parallel to one another. And it’s becoming more widespread. 

According to a new study from Intch, a platform that connects top professionals with businesses for part-time roles, employees are taking on new roles while keeping their old ones in droves.

The study analyzed more than 142,000 employees’ career histories, which included 1.05 million roles, and found that parallel work has doubled across generations: While around 29% of boomers hold multiple roles at the same time, Gen Xers do so 44% of the time. And for the youngest generations of workers, the numbers are even higher: 59% of Gen Zers are working in multiple roles, while 64% of millennial workers do. 

Essentially, that means employment is now less of a straight line than ever. These days, workers are gaining multiple specialized skills at once by juggling concurrent positions, often in the same area, but for different employers.

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