‘Data Entry’ most boring and fun job for Indian freelancers: Study

The most different age group is Baby Boomers, who find IT, Design and Marketing tasks the most boring, while ranking writing tasks as their most fun job.

In what appears to be something unique to India, ‘Data Entry’ is the most boring and at the same time, the most fun job role for freelancers here, according to data shared exclusively with Moneycontrol by Freelancer.com.

Data entry is actually the top skill for Indian freelancers, with 35.7 percent of users saying they have the skill. In comparison, only 6.76 percent of freelancers from the United States have listed data entry as a skill.

Currently, Indians make up the highest percentage of users on the Sydney-based freelance platform, with over 1.73 crore registered either as freelancers or as clients. In 2022, Freelancer.com added 12.29 lakh new users from India, with students making up the largest percentage, 30.5 percent.

On the boring job question, the world view remains aligned with Indians about data entry. However, the most fun job has different takes, according to the survey. Almost half of the respondents (49 percent) rank design tasks as their number one fun task. This is followed by Writing (40 percent) and IT related tasks (31 percent).

Across the board, Gen Z, Millennials and Gen X all share similar job preferences — they hate data entry jobs, love design and writing jobs, and become bored at work when tasks become too repetitive.

The only difference across these three generations is that Gen Z ranks data entry as their third preference, while Millennials enjoy IT tasks, and Gen X says customer service tasks are a fun and exciting part of their day.

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Gen Z refers to people born between 1997 and 2012, Gen X were born between 1965-1980, Millennials are those born between 1980-1995 and Baby Boomers were born between 1945-1965.

The most different age group is Baby Boomers, who find IT, Design and Marketing tasks the most boring, while ranking writing tasks as their most fun job. Baby boomers also believe that boredom is caused by too much administrative work.

Region-wise

Data entry is the most boring job across all regions — North America, Latin America (LATAM), Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) — but this is not the case for the other boring jobs.

Respondents from North America, EMEA and LATAM all rank Finance as their second most boring job, but respondents from APAC feel Writing is the second most boring job. Coming in third for both LATAM and APAC are Customer Service tasks, while North America finds IT jobs boring and EMEA find Writing tasks more boring.

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Design and writing tasks are uniformly the most fun jobs worldwide, with all regions reporting this as their most fun and exciting tasks.

All regions, however, rank different jobs in their third spot, with North America picking Marketing, EMEA going with IT, LATAM choosing Customer Service, and APAC selecting data entry.