I Want to, but First I Need to: Understanding Crowdworkers' Career Goals, Challenges, and Tensions

Abstract

Career development is vital for ensuring a happy and productive workforce, and for maintaining relevance in a rapidly changing economy shaped by technological progress. Yet career development is largely ignored in crowdwork. Crowdwork platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) do not support crowdworkers in reskilling and changing careers. In this paper, we study the career goals of AMT workers and the challenges they face in trying to transition out of crowdwork and into high-skill jobs offline or into specialized freelance work. We performed a qualitative study in which we surveyed 20 AMT workers and interviewed 6 of them about their career goals, how they are currently pursuing them, and the challenges they have faced. We found that crowdworkers aspire to transition out of AMT but face challenges due to lack of career guidance, and limited time and financial resources. Drawing on literature in career studies and organization science, we discuss how crowdworkers' challenges are further aggravated by the enviornment on AMT, and provide implications for future research and design that may better support crowdworkers in making a career change.