By 2020, forecasts software developer Intuit, 40 percent or 60 million members of the labor force will be contract employees.

Actually, Intuit might be underestimating that trend.  Just consider the impact of technology, which requires and facilitates short-term projects.

For example, today the team is together to create the iPhone app for identifying crime hotspots in urban neighborhoods.  By fall the members are scattered around the world collaborating in 60 different teams to develop other products and services. 

In addition, as we know, global competition will continue to push business to extreme cost efficiency.  Saving money comes from complete flexibility about manpower. One of the most expensive costs for organizations is the fixed one of full-time manpower salaries and benefits. 

Consequently, contract work likely will replace traditional career paths, with a whole new bunch of winners and losers.  Instead of a temporary situation, stigmatized as "not having a real job," this way of earning a living could become The Game. 

As The New York Times reported, 20 years ago lawyer Sara Horowitz was already onto that trend when she made it her mission to launch the Freelancers Union, providing among other services affordable health care.  Recently the Obama Administration provided $340 million in low-interest loans to expand that the Union’s medical centers.

Another pioneer had been writer Laurel Touby who started Mediabistro.com as a network for freelance writers for training, assignments, promoting themselves, finding out about the market such as how Redbook treats freelance writers. and socializing. In 2007, she sold Mediabistro.com to Jupitermedia for $23M.

Horowitz and Touby, as early adopters, took on considerable risk. Right now, the good news for established businesses and entrepreneur is that they can enter this contract-worker niche for developing services on more solid footing. The kinds and number of options are infinite. To just cite a handful, there are PR, recruiting, human resources, career-counseling, training, branding, and predictive analytics firms to work for.

For instance, take the field of PR. Clients such as Apple already use public affairs assistance in how they position their global contract work force for investors, business partners, media, unions, government leaders, sustainability advocates, and the laborers themselves. This could become standard.  

Then there’s the field of Big Data. Those in that space will be mining the numbers to identify what kinds of expertise and temperaments are most productive in projects requiring contract workers. Incidentally, they are already doing that for recruiting and screening full-time help.

At Laws.com, an ecommerce legal network for both consumers and lawyers, the founder and CEO Boris Kreiman has already developed the contract-lawyer niche as a new line of business. Law firms of all sizes are struggling with new models to accommodate client demand for lower fees.  A big piece of that is reducing fixed costs by using just-in-time lawyers.  The writing is on the wall: With fewer full-time lawyers needed, being a contract one is becoming a career path. 

"Contract lawyers," says Kreiman, "should approach this with a strategic focus, just as they would have in a full-time permanent job. Part of that, we have found, is developing multiple sources of income. For instance, instead of simply planning to make a living performing document reviews for law firms, simultaneously they can brand themselves to attract other kinds of assignments, train to do freelance work as a recruiter in a temporary agency, operate their own small legal practice through online stores, and interpret data about jury selection in criminal trials.” 

Businesses that haven’t factored in the implications of a contract work force will be where enterprises were which ignored social networks. Likewise, on the micro level, professionals who haven’t embraced the reality of being players in the just-in-time work force, with a variety of skills and multiple sources of revenue, will continue to be underemployed.


* * *

Jane Genova, a contract worker for a quarter of a century, is a full-time permanent communications specialist at Laws.com.