When you look for a job, you are looking for something that is fading from the socioeconomic picture because it is past its evolutionary prime.
William Bridges – Change Author
A few years ago, Harvard Business Review, said the following about gig-work:
“The fundamental unit of such an economy is not the corporation but the individual. Tasks aren’t assigned and controlled through a stable chain of management but rather are carried out autonomously by independent contractors. These electronically connected freelancers – e-lancers – join together into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services. When a job is done – after a day, a month, and a year – the network dissolves, and its members become independent agents again, circulating through the economy, seeking the next assignment.”[i]
If the above quote is prescient, why should someone hire you or use your services in a crowded field of human and machine applicants? Some human competitors may be smarter and offer the same services as you do. Some machine applications may work faster and cheaper than you. And, work can be done virtually and just-in-time in any place of the world. Then, there are the robots, who may do many tasks as well as you can or better.
And, there’s a chance that you may be unemployed, which would be a personal paradigm shift. You may need to change your point of view of work from risk averse to risk sensitive or even to risk taking perspective. You may have to evolve and see work much like a startup sees opportunity as possibility and even probability where others see impossibility. Another personal paradigm shift is to see your work in terms of a value exchange. Value can be designing a product or delivering an essential service. The value exchange is a difficult concept to accept for long-term employees and union members.
Work Lesson Earned: As a fundamental business unit, so what is your value-added differentiator and why should somebody hire you? This is the essence of establishing a personal brand in a disruptive economy. You need to be prepared to work in a gig and robotic economy.
[i] ‘The Dawn of the E-lance Economy’, Harvard Business Review, September, 1998.