"Rural sourcing" a growing employment trend

“Rural workers  – competing on par with workers in big cities!”

Could it be? (Uh… YES!)

Gigom recently featuring the “rural sourcing trend”.

The analysis discovered that:

  • Small towns meet or beat large cities in terms of the number of online workers per capita
  • Contractors in small towns worked more than 175 hours in January, which compares favorably with the hours worked by contractors in the larger cities: New York (70 hours), San Francisco (54 hours) and Los Angeles (23 hours)

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me or any of my workshifting peers. If anything, it’s surprising that this issue doesn’t get more press coverage, for the very reason the article mentions at the end:

Rural Sourcing chief executive Monty Hamilton reports that his employees are:

in places where … $150,000 still buys you a great house with a great piece of property, where people want to stay and raise their families.

Until recently, I think the overall assumption has been that “only retirees” would leave a city for a small town. But, it appears that my peers (30-somethings) are working from smaller towns in increasing numbers, too.

(How else can we afford to pay off our stupidly expensive student loans? Or buy a house when the work landscape for many professionals is shifting toward frequent assignments versus long-term, “permanent” employment? The latter is my happy work arrangement.)