Crowd Work on a CV? Understanding How AMT Fits into Turkers' Career Goals and Professional Profiles
This research addresses the problem of career advancement for crowd workers, offering insights to improve support systems, though it is incremental as it builds on prior frameworks.
The study investigated how Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers perceive and integrate crowd work into their career goals and professional profiles through a survey of 98 Turkers, finding that it extends understanding of crowd workers' motivations and can inform tools to support their career advancement.
In 2013, scholars laid out a framework for a sustainable, ethical future of crowd work, recommending career ladders so that crowd work can lead to career advancement and more economic mobility. Five years later, we consider this vision in the context of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). To understand how workers currently view their experiences on AMT, and how they publicly present and share these experiences in their professional lives, we conducted a survey study with workers on AMT (n=98). The survey we administered included a combination of multiple choice, binary, and open-ended (short paragraph) items gauging Turkers' perceptions of their experiences on AMT within the context of their broader work experience and career goals. This work extends existing understandings of who crowd workers are and why they crowd work by seeking to better understand how crowd work factors into Turkers' professional profiles, and how we can subsequently better support crowd workers in their career advancement. Our survey results can inform the design of better tools to empower crowd workers in their professional development both inside and outside of AMT.