noteworthy wrote:

Since the recession began, the economy has eliminated roughly 4.4 million jobs, and more than half of those positions — some 2.6 million — disappeared in the last four months.

The acceleration has convinced some economists that, far from an ordinary downturn after which jobs will return, the contraction under way reflects a fundamental restructuring of the American economy. In crucial industries — particularly manufacturing, financial services and retail — many companies have opted to abandon whole areas of business.

I think the entire paradigm of "work" is changing. In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, the idea of having dedicated functional divisions in an organization is ludicrous. Even in medium sized companies (1000+ FTEs), there is too much dead weight that doesn't add value to the organization. I speak of things like AR/AP, payroll, dedicated IT infrastructure, PR, and countless other "titles" and functional roles that are generally not working 100% of the time. Even if they were, they are not adding considerable value relative to the cost of having a market-rate salary+benefits to support that role.

Add to this the constant difficulty in most organizations of gathering, evaluating, communicating, and resourcing priorities and you have a big problem. This is one of the big reasons why large organizations fail to innovate and often get overran by their smaller, more nimble competitors. Simply put, too many people, doing too many things that are not core-competence, yields little value to earnings.

There's also a big economic story here. Headcount is expense. And with the stratospheric rise of benefits and health care costs for each FTE, it's getting harder and harder to justify a full time employee. Not withstanding is the stock option expense, so even officers are becoming burdensome (exec jokes need not be uttered here).

So I think that the trend is going to be freelance, freelance, freelance. For one, it allows the freelancer to build a stronger career and skillset. They will work across multiple projects, potentially in multiple industries, quicker, and be able to parlay that experience faster. For the company, it allows them to reconfigure quicker, on the fly, and have access to expensive performers that increase the odds of yielding successful outcomes for a project. They won't necessarily lose institutional knowledge, since it's rare that a consultant comes in, does their thing, and leaves without anyone knowing what they did. I see this benefiting both sides, with companies being able to move quickly and with competitive advantage, and for the freelancer, as being able to not be tied down to a particular corporate bureaucracy and timeline.

In short, it's the end of work as we know it, where everyone is a privateer, and corporations are just teams where the brand lives and resources are centralized.