Why you need a Personal Pay Wall
Work is transforming. Are you ready to profit from your know-how?
Most online sites that offer services, tools, or access to a community have paywalls. These sites will provide you with enough information and content to whet your appetite and then tuck the rest away behind their wall until you subscribe.
In the post-COVID world, more of us will work remotely and in more fractional rather than full-time roles. Trends suggest that knowledge workers will increasingly offer their know-how to prospective employers through some form of online service. Since we don’t want to give away everything for free, we’ll need to consider some form of personal paywall working on our behalf, combined with a host of new services. Your new online message might sound something like this:
‘I’m here for you. I know this space, I have these skills, and I’m willing to share these skills fractionally, for a fee. This site shows many examples of my work and success stories — if we match, I’ll schedule us.’
Even those of us with traditional jobs might consider side-line gigs in non-competitive areas or as money-making hobbies. The gig economy has worked this way for a while now, and I’m suggesting that there is an expanding open talent economy for everyone else, including today’s gig players. The following describes several current work shifts that support my argument.
Remote First Work — A significant change impacting us all right now is the virtualization of work. For many, the biggest realization of 2020 was that ‘remote-first work’ can and will likely always be part of everyday work. A recent McKinsey study suggested that “The Coronavirus era has broken through cultural and technological barriers that prevented remote work in the past, setting in motion a structural shift in where work takes place, at least for some people.” Work productivity is up, the number of meetings is up, hours of work are up. “94% of 800 employers surveyed by Mercer said that productivity was the same as or higher than it was before the pandemic, even with their employees working remotely”.
Remote First Skills — New ways of working require a whole new set of skills. We are learning about virtual team dynamics, remote project management, virtual agile teams, and the leadership characteristics necessary for the remote workplace. These work examples represent new practices and skills that need to be developed by both businesses and individuals, and they are just a few of the new skills being uncovered. While not all roles and work types will benefit from remote work practice, McKinsey suggests that as much as “20% of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if working from an office. If remote work took hold at that level, that would mean three to four times as many people working from home than before the pandemic.” We finally recognize the pivotal roles that some normally less visible people play in our businesses. There are connectors, organizers, moderators, creatives and facilitators at work across all business levels providing lifeblood for companies as they stretch themselves into remote-first work thinking. This shift will profoundly impact urban economies, transportation, consumer spending, and the amount we work.
New Work Shapes — The shape of work requests and the size of jobs are also shifting quickly. Now that the delivery playing field is virtual, organizations have learned to buy skills in smaller pieces or in bursts designed to address immediate needs. While the gig economy was well established before COVID, it has expanded to include an even more incredible array of open talent. Everything from fractional C-Suite players and executive coaches to coding teams and crowd forming services are now in play. Pieces and parts of job roles are being offered to solve short-term problems faster. This is not merely a cost-saving measure, as task shape and organizational resilience are also driving factors. The burgeoning supply side of this open marketplace is compelling us all to consider what we know, how we package what we know, and then how we sell it to a growing number of flexible and often global organizations.
The demand side of the marketplace is growing as well, albeit not as quickly. Upwork estimates that 57.3 million people already freelance in the U.S.A. and that by 2027, there will be 86.5 million freelancers. McKinsey has estimated that overall the independent workforce is much larger than previously recognized. Some 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population in the United States and EU-15 countries are engaged in some form of independent earning today.
Disappearing Job Roles — As these work shifts are just developing, we also find ourselves amid a massive global change in the number and variety of job categories being offered — a trend that has been underway for several years. While some assume the work world will return to the way it functioned before the lockdown, the future work signal does not look favourable. Economies may be opening back up, but work opportunity is not what it was pre-COVID. Hundreds of millions of people could find themselves without work in the years ahead as the 4th Industrial Revolution takes hold. The World Economic Forum, Future Of Jobs report suggests that 75 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 133 million new roles may emerge as we adapt. Post-COVID numbers from the UN’s International Labour Organization predict that 1.6 billion informal economy workers could suffer “massive damage” to their livelihoods. By the second quarter of 2020, we may see that COVID may have cost us the equivalent of 305 million full-time jobs. Clearly, for many, the future of work will require a great deal more flexibility — and that might be a good thing for some of us.
While companies agree that they still have plenty of jobs that need doing, this work will come in spurts or require new previously unanticipated skills to complete the task. This approach may also mean combining two or more skill sets for the same job, as we begin to cross over our skills for specific roles/jobs. Forward-thinking individuals are looking closely at the emerging ‘open talent economy’ as a way to supplement income or as a full-time work alternative. And it’s not just a way to pay bills. For many of us, gig work is a preferred lifestyle choice, made more evident and available during the COVID crisis.
The result is that many companies will be leveraging a growing community of factional talent workers to meet their needs. Companies view this employment dynamic as a type of ‘liquid workforce’ that can be tapped into for nearly every skill and interest area, without the need to lock the person or the company into traditional employment contracts. Once teams establish trust, many forms of work can be transacted as carefully sized gigs that are mostly delivered remotely.
New Tools and Platforms — So, how can you dip your toe into this new liquid work pool? Are you ready to share your skills and know-how across an open marketplace? As your first stop, you can sign up with a variety of gig economy leaders such as Moonlighting, Fiverr, Upwork, FlexJobs, Toptal, Freelancer, LocalSolo, TopCoder and many more. Each of these platforms offers services to specific communities, with a corresponding uplift on your work, so plan to do some homework before jumping in. You will also need to take some time to understand how best to establish your brand and position your offerings to the world.
If I had a dollar for every time someone reached out via LinkedIn or other professional networks asking for a fraction of my time for work, a chat, or a discussion, I’d be wealthy. People don’t always ask for my core skills, such as, Design Thinking, Innovation, Crowdsourcing, Technology or People Development. Most requests are for an experienced eye on something, and it’s all about the sharing of that experience with the knowledge seeker. I’ve made this same request of many friends and colleagues over the years, and it’s invaluable. As this new employment model blooms, I see a more robust platform need emerging. As everyone tries to make themselves available to the open talent workforce, they will need to create a shop window and a personal paywall. Your comprehensive know-how — that less quantifiable experience you have gathered over time is also valuable to the open talent universe.
As this new way of working matures, we will actively share our knowledge with customers or tap into others’ experience to get tasks done. This process will necessitate a more straightforward way to get paid. Such a platform will need to handle promotional activities and all financial transactions with anyone in the world and a smooth way to schedule these collaborative exchanges.
A startup called PickMyBrain.world is tackling this challenge, and I’ve signed up. I have a profile on the platform and hope to make my openly available talent exchange simpler. I also want to be a part of a community of like-minded leaders because I’ll need their know-how too. Think of this new platform model as somewhere between an ‘Airbnb Experience’ and monetization of your LinkedIn profile, with the added benefit of organized cash flow and a calendar booking service. Since many more open talent job seekers are coming, this sort of brain-picking business service and talent model will be enormous.
In 2020 the world’s human connection opportunity expanded. In coming years another 3.5 billion people will be connected around the globe through satellite-delivered broadband services. If we are all headed out into the next workplace that is a blend of remote work and a portfolio of smaller jobs, shouldn’t we each have a talent shop and paywall?
Start thinking about opening your open talent shop door today — it may well be your future model for work.
Additional resources:
Open Assembly Report: Future of Work Trends — Future of Work Trends to Plan for in 2020 and Beyond
What’s next for remote work: An analysis of 2,000 tasks, 800 jobs, and nine countries
The Open Talent Economy -People and work in the borderless economy
Study Finds Productivity Not Deterred by Shift to Remote Work
Gig Mindset: Reclaim Your Time, Reinvent Your Career, and Ride the Next Wave of Disruption
ILO: As job losses escalate, nearly half of the global workforce at risk of losing livelihoods
Gig Economy: Definition, Statistics & Trends [2020 Update]
After COVID, we may be in a volatile gig economy that relies heavily on the internet
The Third Wave of Virtual Work — Harvard Business Review
A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers
Remote-work resources | GitLab
20 Fully Remote Companies That Thrive on Virtual Work
