Group items tagged

businesses are increasing their dependency on contingent labor – even if the global economy is improving.

growing reliance on consultants, intermittent employees, or contingent labor.

businesses are increasing their dependency on contingent labor – even if the global economy is improving.

Tucked away in the pages of a new report by the U.S. General Accounting Office is a startling statistic: 40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers—that is, people who don’t have what we traditionally consider secure jobs.

It reinforces estimates of the independent workforce that have come from observers ranging from the Freelancers Union to Faith Popcorn

people in this workforce are struggling economically

Cost flexibility:

Speed and agility:

A boost to innovation:

This development has been dubbed “The Open Talent Economy” in Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends 2013 study: the evolving workforce is a mixture of full-time employees, contractors, freelancers and, increasingly, workers with no formal ties to an enterprise.

But one area people haven’t thought much about is the aging of the workforce. As people live longer, they will still be vigorous and want to have income, but they might want to change the nature of their status within the workforce.” She points to a Boston company that provides its clients with C-level executives who take on limited-run consulting engagements. This is the type of high-level “temporary worker” that is outside the bounds of traditional workforce planning—and is usually not captured by traditional technology.

5 – THE EMERGING GIG ECONOMY The emerging Gig Economy means that there is no longer such a thing a job for life.-  in fact, for most individuals this means they are going to have a life of jobs. One estimate is that current students will have more than 10 jobs by the time they are 38. Companies are also going to be seeing a growing contingent workforce (made up of freelancers, independent professionals and temporary contract workers). Research from Ernst and Young shows that two in five organisations expect to increase their use of the contingent workforce by 2020. This means that people are going to be recruited WITH the skills to do a job; not recruited AND THEN trained to do the job. So if employees want to stay in a company they will therefore need to keep their skills up to date themselves. But in fact, supporting individuals to do just this will actually be beneficial to the organisation as it will reduce the costs of recruitment, So this means helping individuals organize and manage their own professional self-development inline with organizational objectives to achieve a  new level of performance.

Companies struggle to develop a learning culture. About half (52 percent) of executives says their company can retain, update, and share institutional knowledge, and only 47 percent say their company has a culture of continuous learning.

The 2020 workforce will be increasingly flexible and companies are unprepared. Forty-one percent of executives say their company is increasingly using contingent workers and 42 percent say this approach is affecting their workforce strategy.

Even though executives cite education and institutional training as the most important employee attribute

53 million voting-age Americans

Politicos, meet freelancers.

More than one in three Americans (34%) is doing some type of freelance work