very light indeed.

what i’m talking about is the feeling of being part of something bigger and collective. It could be an open source community or a corporate institution. It just can’t be you own carreer project and it certainly cant be an agency (whose fate is to be desintermediated anyway with tools such as Linkedin or the forthcoming NotchUp).

I have many professional friends that are freelancers, making excellent money and who happen to be quite depressed by this. They dont want to go back to regular job because of the loss of income but on the other hand they feel like they haven’t contributed to some kind of collective professional adventure. And boy they miss it.

I’m a huge fan of linkedin. I’m not quite sure what their business model is but i’m not sure they’re bothered if you consider the number of users and page views. I think they actually implement a concept that has never been realized before (other than with ridiculous and unMcLeoded business cards) : the professional network. This service represents a huge value for an IT professional like me.

Self-management is forever. Probably focused on: mentality change on resilience, stress management and value repositioning (how frequently and rapidly you review your plans, substitute corporate loyalty with personal integrity etc).

This is what I sense and what Cecil’s experience as a freelancer states.

Cecil, I also believe that without a larger project and some ideas to believe in, work becomes ugly. I stay open to the question if these will be provided by the corporate institution or the agency that helps you with multithematic freelancing and makes your children happy to grow up with you. Thanks for sharing experience, it’s precious.

Vincent, nice you mentioned LinkedIn : I feel that it has an enormous potential to evolve into a powerful tool because it can interconnect project platforms like innocentive and match the knowledge accumulated on professionals and their networks. Up to now, it has had a rather passive networking function, I know few people who use it actively to find a job or contact other professionals on a specific purpose. Maybe because it is rather immature, but again I don’t fully get its business model.

Liz, thank you for the reaction. I would be very interested to have your vision on the current situation as well as the perspectives of Innocentive. I’ll contact you soon.

This is an interesting post – we’ve found that many of our Solvers use our network as a way of working fullitime or suplementing the income from their day-job. They say they enjoy the freedom of choosing on a project by project basis, and enjoy the challenge itself.

If you ever want to learn more about us feel free to contact me!

Regards

Liz Moise

Marketing Manger

InnoCentive

Whether it is to work on a project basis or to fully invest their energy into one or a couple of companies or public services in their whole professional life.

We have to be careful here : this per project thing may be sexy if you’re a skillful professional. Then you can make enough money to compensate for the stress coming from the lack of visibility on your forthcoming projects. I’m not sure that this situation may have such appeal for people with less moneyable skills.

Besides, I also believe that people need to buy into a larger project than their own carrier, they need to have a carreer that makes sense, they need to have this belonging and loyalty feeling, even if it’s only for a couple of years. I have worked for about half my carreer as an independant consultant (actualy I currently am today) and this is what I have missed during these spells. This is something that the good money you make can’t buy.

Lastly, I think that believing that a company can work like this is a mistake. You need to have people (from experience I would tend to think half of the work force at least) making sure you keep a company culture, team spirit and all these soft elements that glue people together and make the spine of a successful company.

So what do you see as the solution? Is there a personal job management system out there? LinkedIN? Or agencies? Or self-management?

About employees as multithematic freelancers. That is definitely a possible future, encouraged by the huge lay-offs during the last recession and the hugely self-taught digital workforce, able to develop projects in fairly small teams.

That doesn’t apply to everyone, companies will benefit hugely from keeping some resources in-house, but to certain types of resources—those which either need to be replaced periodically, making outsourcing cheaper, or those that are only needed periodically, what you called “ultra specialized”—can and should probably be outsourced.

So, while still hypothetical, an interesting point indeed.

It observes a change on employment: working in parallel in multiple jobs that are not necessarily neither thematically related nor under the same employer.

The observation starts from the two platforms set up by Amazon and Innocentive to outsource a big part of their tasks/not to another enterprise neither to an employee but to a per-project collaborator ( a contractor).

These contracts exist already for specialized engineers (and maybe others), however the fact of setting up a platform, may signify a strategic change on the way employment is perceived : rather than an personal engagement, a job can equal a collection of tasks.

To support the generalization that employment is transforming into personal multi-project management,and for a company into an opensouce project some arguments are that:

–For a company: it should be easier and cheaper to manage a platform and the risk of matching offer-demand when addressing a pool of hypothetically everybody over 18 equiped with internet than managing individuals

–For the jobs : Apparently any domain can be “industrialized” since very different jobs can be cut down in tasks (from backoffice support to science).

–For the market: stimulates the chain of providers by leaving space for new types of jobs

–For an employee: Increases the degree of implication as he/she is challenged to invest her/his various skills on various projects

Thus this generalization calls for reactions : do you believe most employees will be multithematic freelancers?Has the web this kind of influence?If yes in what form (what jobs, how many, what frequency of swithcing?)

If nope why not?

Btw, love your tags!