The Contingent Workforce

(page 2 of 2)

The constant theme with most people who work for companies as full-time regular employees is, "I don't get recognition, I don't feel like I'm being acknowledged, I don't get access to projects, and I don't have someone connecting the dots between the job I'm doing and the difference it's making in the world or in our company."

These sentiments drive a lot of workers to look to themselves to try to begin creating self-recognition through self-employment. As a contractor, you can determine what projects you work on, how you cultivate your skills, and how you choose what people you work with and the projects you work on. Five or 10 years ago, jumping around from job to job completely ruined your résumé. But now I think it has just become much more acceptable.

The shift to a contingent workforce isn't going to happen overnight. And for your readers who are considering shifting to consulting, they can start to plan and market themselves now—before they're forced to make the change by suffering a layoff.

This sounds fairly positive, but what are the obstacles facing consultants?

The risks are high for people who aren't wise to the dynamics of the changing workplace. Going from a situation where companies provide you everything—health and liability insurance, retirement planning, sick days, and educational reimbursement—to consulting, where you have to provide for yourself, is a big paradigm shift.

Some major health providers and insurance companies have started to create competitive long-term health benefits packages for individuals, where in the past these were only available to corporations through group health programs.

How is the Web helping companies streamline their staffing?

Companies can now very quickly communicate job or contract requirements to a large and broad marketplace of people and attract the best candidates at the best rate. The Web as a staffing supply chain is really helping to normalize pricing and streamline the sourcing of contract workers, so that just-in-time workers can be assigned to projects and so forth.

This is causing staffing suppliers to become much more efficient in terms of the tools they have used to recruit source and manage their workers, but it's also driving a pricing-normalization strategy, which will really help to normalize the pricing structure for contract labor.

Thanks for your thoughts. As companies become more focused on contingent employees, individuals are going to have to take more responsibility for their own careers. While one could argue whether this change is positive for the larger society, it's happening anyway, and workers at all levels—including professionals—need to consider the ramifications.

Marshall Goldsmith, who writes Marshall and Friends every week for BusinessWeek.com, can be reached at Marshall@MarshallGoldsmith.com. He provides his articles and videos online at MarshallGoldsmithLibrary.com.