Employment Landscape Is Changing

The market place as we speak is changing very rapidly. I came across an article, “The Next American Frontier” written by Michael S. Malone and I felt his insights on the new age is so spot-on that I believe this is not going to happen only in America but all around the world.

Newspapers are dying, networks are dying, and if teenage boys playing GTA 4 and World of Warcraft have any say about it, so is television. More than 200 million people now belong to just two social networks: MySpace and Facebook. And there are more than 80 million videos on YouTube, all put there by the same individual initiative.

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today's high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will never work for an established company if they can help it. To them, having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can imagine.

We do not have to wait for another five years to see this phenomena taking place locally. This fundamental shift as I blog is happening right beneath our feet whether we like it or not. One clear evidence is that never before had I witnessed fresh graduates that confessed they are “unemployable”. What do we expect when half of their time was involved in creating content for their Facebook pages. Unconsciously, that experience had produced many entrepreneurs in the making. In a way, the internet phenomena has indeed turned our world upside-down and if everyone now has equal footing to access of information, customers and expertise, it looks like making it on my own is not a far-fetched idea anymore. Twenty years ago, no youngster can dare to even dream this far.

With such a shift in behavioral patterns, the employers may have to rethink their hiring and manpower planning strategy. For a while, the idea of outsourcing work to freelancers or contractors do not look very appealing and the solution seems to be a temporary one than anything else. But note this: this temporary solution might as well be your strategic long term plan. And the concept of getting people to work for you needs to be quickly changed to getting the right partner or people to work with you. We are experiencing a water shed moment, and like it or not, the wind of change in the employment landscape is taking place now and the question of whether we will be affected by it or not is mute. More likely, the pertinent question is whether or not we should quickly embrace and take the lead or resist and get crushed by it later.