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.
Yakov Filippenko, CEO and founder of Intch, tells Fast Company that employees “holding positions at different companies at the same time” is another way that parallel roles are playing out.
“We have a real-life example on our own team at Intch: Our head of HR also has a full-time job at another tech company, and our head of payments has a similar arrangement,” Filippenko says.
The CEO adds: “Both are fully transparent about it. It’s a way for professionals to pursue opportunities at more than one company without leaving their existing jobs.”
While working side gigs isn’t exactly new, more people seem to be holding multiple roles that are either full-time or part-time as a way to maintain financial security, but also to diversify their skills.
According to a 2025 survey from Fiverr, an online marketplace for freelance services, 67% of Gen Zers said they need more than one stream of income for financial reasons. And more than half (55%) said they believe traditional employment will become obsolete, as individuals take on more than one role more often.
Still, holding multiple roles might be savvy in terms of your bank account and broadening your skill set, but it seems likely to lead to burnout.
However, some Gen Zers say that using technology—like leaning on AI or even being able to run businesses online with a flexible schedule—actually creates a sense of freedom.
Carissa Ferguson, an actor who does voice-overs, creates content online, and is a copywriter, said in the Fiverr survey that balancing several roles allows for financial freedom that makes leaning deeper into creative work possible. “Having multiple income streams means I never have to turn down an acting or creative opportunity because I’m worried about paying rent,” she says.
Ferguson continues: “I can pack up my laptop and keep my revenue streams running from anywhere. That’s freedom most traditional employees will never experience.”
Given that younger generations tend to work several jobs simultaneously, it makes sense that they’re experiencing higher levels of burnout as well. According to a 2025 poll of 2,000 adults, a quarter of workers are citing burnout before reaching the age of 30.
Interestingly, while the trend took off during the pandemic—which made sense because many workers had spare time—the data has barely budged since. In 2019, 68% of professionals started a new job while already employed. By 2022, that number had grown to 75%, where it has largely remained. In 2025, 73% were still doing so.
Employees used to attempt to hide the fact that they were working multiple jobs at once. But as the trend has stuck around, and a modern economy perhaps demands multiple streams of income, that’s no longer true.
“In a separate snapshot of 700,000 profiles, 97% remained publicly discoverable, and professionals were roughly six times less likely to hide their profiles than they had been two years earlier,” the Intch study explained.
The trend may mean that leaders have to look at hiring differently, moving toward specialized part-time roles for individual tasks instead of filling one complete position with one person.
Likewise, they may also need to examine résumés from a different lens. While a long list of positions was once seen as a lack of focus, this mindset appears to be changing. This shift is particularly true given the median professional has held seven positions over their career.
However, the research asserts that this is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, in modern times, as taking on multiple jobs is commonplace, it could even suggest more “depth” rather than “drift.”
