More on the “future of work”

In my book trip to Europe last week, there was plenty of discussion on the future of work and what it means to countries like Ireland, immigration etc.

This week at a GigaOm event the focus was much more on the mode of how we work and where we work from (home, coffee shop etc). Check out photos of the event courtesy of Josh Hayes

The diversity was brought out by the panel I was invited to:

• Fabio Rosati is one of the savviest people in the market about trends in temporary/contractor employment in his role as CEO of eLance for almost a decade now.
• Lukas Biewald described how clouds are meeting crowds and allowing him and his customers to massively scale their talent needs at CloudFlower.
• Evy Wilkins reminded everyone there is still that important talent source called employees. Her company doyoubuzz is on a mission to spice up boring, Word based resumes.

Our panel was preceded by a talk by Mary Hamilton of Accenture, a reminder that big outsourcers are still a major talent source and source of employment for many. Following our panel was a talk with John Hagel, who spends time on communities and their impact on talent pools in his new book, The Power of Pull.

So, we touched on employees, outsourcers, contractors, crowds and communities – part of our expanding talent landscape. Kudos to Surj Patel, the organizer of the Bunker session for allowing such a wide diversity of discussion in a little over 2 hours.

What I particularly enjoyed was the detours our panel took in unexpected ways – thanks to Sameer Patel, the moderator and questions from the audience. Fabio touched on the need for an advocacy for the  contractor who works from home, likely struggles with healthcare issues. There was a discussion on how different generations are handling this breakdown of the traditional “job”. I mentioned MTV and how its young talent have adapted to  a “gig based” employment model.  Another thread touched on connectivity and collaboration infrastructure as work moves to talent, not the other way round.

Finally, as I looked at the elance website, it is good to see them credit Prof. Tom Malone at MIT for his coining the term “elance” in 1998. I was pleased to include his current work in my book as he and his colleagues breakdown the “genomes” of crowds and communities – what makes them tick. The author of the seminal 2004 book, The Future of Work continues to think ahead for us about the “next gen” future of work.