64% of Millennials Now Hold Multiple Jobs at Once

By Nathan Brooks

64% of millennial workers now hold multiple roles at the same time, according to a new Intch study that analyzed more than 142,000 employees' career histories covering 1.05 million roles. Gen Z sits close behind at 59%, Gen X at 44%, and boomers at 29% — meaning parallel work has effectively doubled from one generation to the next.

The trend has a name: parallel work. Unlike a side gig on top of a full-time job, or fractional arrangements where senior specialists sell a slice of their week to various clients, parallel work means literally holding two jobs at once. Those can be two full-time roles, sometimes even at the same company, or a second career stacked on top of the first.

And here's the twist for practitioners: workers aren't hiding it anymore.

What changed during and after the pandemic?

The trend took off during the pandemic, when many workers had spare time. But it hasn't receded since. In 2019, 68% of professionals started a new job while already employed. By 2022 that number had grown to 75%, where it largely stayed; in 2025, 73% were still doing so.

The secrecy is gone too. "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.

Yakov Filippenko, CEO and founder of Intch — a platform connecting top professionals with businesses for part-time roles — told Fast Company that employees are "holding positions at different companies at the same time."

"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. "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."

Why are workers doing it?

Money first. A 2025 Fiverr survey found that 67% of Gen Zers said they need more than one stream of income for financial reasons, and 55% said they believe traditional employment will become obsolete as people take on multiple roles more often.

Skills second. Concurrent positions let workers build several specializations at once, often in the same field but for different employers.

For some, the payoff is autonomy. Carissa Ferguson, an actor, voice-over artist, online content creator, and copywriter, said in the Fiverr survey that balancing several roles enables creative risk-taking.

"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. "I can pack up my laptop and keep my revenue streams running from anywhere. That's freedom most traditional employees will never experience."

Some Gen Zers also credit technology — leaning on AI, or running online businesses on flexible schedules — with making the juggling act feasible rather than exhausting.

What does this change for hiring managers?

The practical question every employer should be asking: what does a workforce of parallel workers change about how you hire?

Quite a bit, according to the research. Leaders may need to move toward specialized part-time roles for individual tasks instead of filling one complete position with one person. Résumé screening changes too. A long list of positions was once read as a lack of focus; the median professional now holds seven positions over a career, and the Intch research argues that in an era where multiple jobs are commonplace, that history suggests more "depth" rather than "drift."

The burnout trade-off

There's a cost side to the ledger. Younger generations, who work several jobs simultaneously, report higher burnout. A 2025 poll of 2,000 adults found a quarter of workers citing burnout before reaching the age of 30.

The upshot for employers: parallel work is no longer an edge case to police but a structural feature of the labor market — one that rewards companies that design roles around it and punishes those that still screen against it.