Wu Qianjiang (left) operates a drone to transport tangerines during a harvest in Zigui county, Hubei province, on Tuesday. The county has explored e-commerce and cultivated new jobs to help develop the local economy. [Photo by Wang Gang/For China Daily]

Flexible, digital-based employment has grown into an important part of China's job market in recent years, and experts expect it will continue to grow in the near future — in step with the digital economy.

Companies in sectors closely linked to the digital economy, including transportation, logistics, the media and entertainment, are offering more flexible openings to job seekers, according to a report released by recruitment portal Zhaopin and the Institute for Economic and Social Research at Jinan University in Guangdong province.

The report was based on data about job openings and job seekers' preferred professions gathered on the platform from January 2018 to May this year.

It defined flexible jobs in eight sectors, including e-commerce, delivery services and livestreaming, as "new flexible" employment, distinguishing them from traditional part-time jobs due to their role in the digital economy.

Industries that were highly dependent on the digital economy offered more "new flexible" openings, it said, but they also offered such workers less in the way of benefits or social security insurance.

In the transport and logistics sectors, flexible openings accounted for about 44 percent of vacancies, mostly for delivery drivers and couriers. However, in the more traditional real estate and energy industries, flexible openings only accounted for 2.1 and 2.8 percent of vacancies respectively.

The report found that flexible, digital-based jobs were preferred by women, with around 54 percent of female job seekers submitting resumes for openings such as e-commerce operators and livestreaming hosts.

"The flexibly hired population will keep growing with the development of the economic structure and technology," said Li Qiang, vice-president of Zhaopin. "Surveys we've done in the second quarter show that 18.9 percent of people had already taken flexible jobs and 51.1 percent planned to take a job of that kind in the near future.

"Alibaba's research arm, Ali Research, predicts that about 400 million people will be in digital-related flexible jobs by 2036."

He said flexible, digital-based employment had developed because digital technology had changed companies' demand for workers and the landscape of labor relations.

"It's estimated that 40 percent of full-time jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence due to its high working efficiency in the future, and companies will offer more flexible openings to job seekers," Li said.

However, the provision of benefits such as paid leave and insurance to the flexibly employed remains a tough nut to crack.

The report said about 65 percent of traditional openings available on the platform provided social security insurance up to the third quarter of last year, with that rate having since declined to around 55 percent.

The insurance coverage rate for flexible jobs offered on the platform was around 35 percent in the second quarter of 2021 but has fallen continuously since, standing at just 19 percent in the first quarter of this year.

Feng Shuaizhang, dean of the Jinan University research institute, suggested that the flexibly employed be included in the national social security system to better protect their rights. "Regardless of the name or academic definitions, some flexible jobs have no big differences from traditional ones," he said. "For example, working as an online car-hailing driver may not feel much different from being a taxi driver.

"From my point of view, the nation can make efforts to figure out a solution to let the flexibly employed who have relatively stable incomes get regular social security insurance like those working traditional jobs."

Feng said flexible, digital-based employment has a positive effect on the nation's employment stability, but it still needed systematic and long-term regulation in regard to labor relations, workers' professional certification and insurance.