Two things stood out last night as I watched the Denver Broncos sleep through an entire game.
(1) Freelancer.com surpassed 10 Million registered freelancers during Super Bowl 48, and (2) WeatherTech spent millions to simply tell America their weather protecting rubber mats made for automobiles are only manufactured by Americans workers.
Combining the message from the WeatherTech Ad above, and thinking about what is means to have 10 Million freelancers ready to work converges on a notion suggesting there is more going on with what it means to work in America than just having more jobs. Over the last decade, we have seen a redefinition of work itself.
I put them in the following five categories.
1. Back from Bangalore to Boston.
Outsourcing means something different that it did five years ago. CIO.com suggests in 2014 20% to 30% of IT jobs will be coming back to American shores in models where it is more cost effective to hire American workers than hiring workers in other nations. Deloitte reported in 2012 of the 48% of US employment survey respondents that decided to sever offshoring contracts, 34% of said 48% are bringing work back either in house, or "insourcing" enabling catchy phrases such as "from Bangalore to Boston" to exist describing the move back to American shores. This means more Americans with jobs.
2. Pajamas instead of Pinned Stripes
Work is starting to mean something completely different; work is a thing that I do not longer a place that I go. This means the increase in remote workers, irrespective of the work of Marissa Mayer from Yahoo reprimanding Yahoo's employees taking advantage of work the from home policies to pull up their socks, more and more American can work remotely. The Wall Street Journal reported over 40% of management business and financial workers worked from home in 2010, and almost 10% of all U.S. workers work from home in Pajamas at least one day per week and this number is constantly rising. This means more American's can move to low cost of living areas flattening the supply and demand of American jobs, and we can work in our living rooms in pajamas instead of conference rooms in pinned striped suits.
3. Fancy jobs are in Factories
Manufacturing jobs are sexy again. As the Industrial Internet starts to take shape lead by GE and Cisco's Internet of Everything, we are seeing sexy returned to American manufacturing jobs. The New York Times reported in 2013, more than 50% of executives of manufacturing companies with more than 1 Billion in sales plan to return some production back to American from China and install modernization into the factories. This means that every aspect of the workforce will have a knowledge or (smart) component to it, and ergo educated and trained Americans can earn at their highest market rates in these "smart" jobs.
4. From Two Jobs, to a Thousand Tasks
Work itself is becoming insanely "taskified" - meaning more and more work is being broken up into small tasks, and the hyper connectivity that we enjoy is enabling a marketplace of buyers and sellers of tasks to be completed and completed tasks on sites like odesk.com, topcoder.com, taskrabbit.com, and freelancer.com. Just last night during Super Bowl 48, Freelancer.com surpassed the 10 Million registered freelancer mark. While all of the 10 million freelancers are not Americans, the lion's share of work is done by American freelancers "moon lighting" in the work world of tasks. This means more and more Americans can augment earnings on a global marketplace of tasks enabled by hyper connectivity and "taskification" choosing thousands of tasks over what was traditionally a second job.
5. Human as a Service over Stuck in a Role
The way human resource is looked at is changing. Now that we have clouded the capacity for computers to compute and store information creating liquid technology capacity, and we are on our way to software-defined networks. Infrastructure and Platform as a Service are starting to use resource liquidity in the design of a company where human capacity can be consumed as a service. Forbes covered Human as Service in 2012 suggesting teams in organizations will be built and dismantled based on the demand of individual projects. Meaning, no longer will the same 20 employees be stuck working for the same manager for years doing different projects. The design of a team will be specific to a project, and when the project is over the team of human resources (employees) will go back into a pool. This means the hierarchy and power relationships of work will change to one where human capacity will be seen more as a service and liquid than as a stateful and fixed resource unchaining employees from being stuck in a job.
I know, its going to be difficult to resist the memes of the Broncos that will ensue in the next few days can we get out from under Super Bowl 48.
But one this is for sure, we have gotten out from under offshoring and outsourcing realities in the last decade, and the promise of what it means to work in America is well on its way back to becoming awesome sauce.