Jessica O'ConnorA growing number of professionals are turning to ‘secret overemployment’ as a form of self-funded job security, according to research from Enhancv.
The study, titled ‘Why Secret Overemployment Is the New Standard for Job Security’, found that nearly 80% of professionals now see holding multiple full-time roles not as a side hustle, but as a necessary safeguard against an increasingly volatile labour market.
This shift reflects declining confidence in single-employer stability, with workers effectively ‘air-gapping’ their income streams and treating employment more like a diversified portfolio.
According to the data, 79.5% of respondents viewed a second job as essential financial security, functioning as a form of private unemployment insurance.
While overemployment has often been associated with fully remote roles, the research revealed that 50.4% of those holding multiple jobs are primarily office-based, with a further 26.5% working hybrid.
This challenges assumptions that return-to-office policies would limit the practice.
There has also been a notable shift in where overemployment is most common.
Rather than being concentrated in software engineering, which accounted for just 2.3% of respondents, the trend was also prevalent across sectors such as education (16.6%), operations (12.9%) and healthcare (11%).
More than a third (36%) of workers also reported that automation has significantly reduced their workload, allowing them to complete core responsibilities in 30 hours or less and freeing up capacity to take on additional roles.
Despite concerns around divided attention, performance does not appear to be suffering. Over half of respondents said they met or exceeded expectations across two or more jobs simultaneously over the past year.
More than half of overemployed workers said they would require a pay rise of between 21% and 50% to return to a single role, while 12.9% stated that no salary increase would persuade them to give up their additional income stream.
