Letter to a Governor

Over the next few years, the freelance community will represent the majority of the US workforce. Talented professionals seeking to work for themselves will need a place to go to find meaningful, income-generating opportunities, to build teams, and grow their careers. We don’t feel any such community exists and we seek to build it. We also want to create the technological tools that will allow freelancers and project managers to engage more readily – on and off-line – for more substantive professional connection.

Surely the future of work has implications for all generations, not least of which is current high-school and college students.

At a recent event the LiquidTalent team had an opportunity to talk to a prominent politician about the future of work. During the conversation, a question came up about economic opportunities for young people today and how we can improve them for future generations. LiquidTalent is creating an independent marketplace for freelancers, and we feel that what we’re doing has political implications. Creating a freer labor market where talent can readily flow to the opportunities that exist, anytime, anywhere has tremendous implications for policy and economics.

After being asked to think about the job market and offer our thoughts around his campaign, here’s what we sent, in our latest post entitled, Letter to a Governor.

Dear Steve,

I’m writing as a follow up to our substantive conversation regarding creating jobs and also my new company LiquidTalent. As we discussed, it is evident that one of the main concerns of young people today (ages 18–25) is jobs and economic opportunity. The consensus would seem to indicate that it is increasingly difficult to get ahead today, and that finding a good job out of college remains challenging.

I think there are a few things going on here: there is less hiring occurring now than when I graduated in 2005; more employers are looking for young people to “add value” right away- i.e., generate revenue; internships are becoming a more prevalent means to get a paid job, with fewer internships turning into jobs; and more employers are looking to hire part time.

One of the theses of our company is that by 2020 the majority of workers in the US will be freelance (approx. 70 million) — this prediction is widely documented. This will be a result of the millennial generation largely wanting to start their own businesses, and due to corporate job cuts. Yet I don’t think the story is as bleak as one might believe.

Technology isn’t necessarily eating the world. What’s eating the world is a lack of updated skills.

US news and world report just named software developer as the #1 job in the US in 2014. We have a workforce that has not updated its tool kit. With all the demand for technologists, the supply curve still has some catching up to do. Programs such as General Assembly and Dev Bootcamp will help fill the gap. These programs will also turn aspiring developers into startup founders. While not everyone is going to be a technologist, everyone can be productive- they just may need to be productive in the areas where there’s demand for productivity, many of which seem to be technical in nature.

What is interesting is that I think there are a lot more jobs out there than are reported. There’s tremendous latency in two core areas: technology jobs, and un-revealed project-based work. At LiquidTalent we speak with businesses every day that have needs for project-based work for anything from technology projects — such as website and mobile apps — to branding, to copywriting, to social media marketing to project management. We’re finding that businesses don’t know where to go to reliably post projects and be assured that they can attract the requisite talent to complete the project efficiently. Millions of dollars of economic opportunity sit latent due to a lack of transparency for project posting and a means of attracting local, accountable talent.

LiquidTalent is looking to solve this problem. We earnestly believe that by creating a place where small businesses can post projects that they know will get completed and give talented freelancers a place to market themselves and further build their skillsets, there will be an increasingly freer labor market. The advent of cloud computing and intelligent matching will help solve the problems of latent projects in the future economy by allowing employers to post projects and create teams that work together locally and from anywhere.

And by identifying the project needs, the available skills, and the gaps in between, one can look to fill those skill gaps with technical programs, education, MOOCs and other learnings to make sure that more people can make themselves relevant either to paying institutions (in the case of service providers working as 1099 contractors) or to customers if the newly empowered workforce chooses to build their own businesses.

We sense a large shift in the economy that is just at the beginning. Airbnb would call it the share economy. We might call it that too.

It’s also the project economy. The idea that more people will be working fewer hours in different spaces, from different locations — the era of work as a timeshare.

That people can monetize their spare capacity and that they can have income diversification just as they can have investment diversification.

I would be more than happy to discuss any of this further. And I would also like to see about having LiquidTalent help to fill some of those projects you mentioned that require talented people to complete them. We have both the technology and the talent pools to assist in state and private hiring needs and look forward to bringing more career-building opportunities to the future of work.